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Critically evaluate Hall's encoding/decoding model

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 Historically, communication studies research primely focuses on the oversimplistic

mass effects that media produce on the passive mass as the audience (Livingstone, 2015) and

later turn to audience studies focusing on the active role on audience affected by their social

relations (Ott & Mack, 2019). However, though the latter audience research acknowledges

the autonomy of audience not only serve as the receivers but could also work as influential

meaning sources, their functional and individualistic gaze is likely to fail to represent mass

effects on the collective level. Hall (1991) then advances the seminal encoding and decoding

theory, which tries to mediate these studies by directing the focus of media studies to the

discursive process in-between the “media effects” and “audience reception” within the

communicative exchange (Palmer, 2020, p.31). Admittedly, though there are certain

“unanswered questions” itself (Morley, 2006) and unpredicted problems if it were to be

applied in the context of information society where interactive technology, such as social

media, becomes rather prevailing. Therefore, this essay will argue that while Hall's

encoding/decoding model (1991) remains as an influential inspiration to audience research, it

receives internal challenges from limited typologisation of codings and external pressure from

interactive communication environment. This essay will firstly introduce Hall’s

encoding/decoding model with its origin and aim, then evaluate its limitation in terms of

coding typologisation and application in the context of immersive, interactive and commercial

media with original examples. In the end, it suggests that the encoding/decoding model may

involve the coding competition within the coding process as a new perspective to explore the

audience in a media society.

Derived from the semiology research (Jones & Holmes, 2011; Shaw, 2017; Hodkinson,

2017) and inspired by Marx’s model of production and consumption (Behrenshausen, 2015;
D’Acci, 2004; Jones & Holmes, 2011), Hall’s encoding/decoding model analyses media

consumption in terms of audience and hopes to lead the audience studies to a new stage (Hall,

1980, p. 131). The model summarises four typologies to explain questions about discourse,

meaning and power (Jones & Holmes, 2011; Hodkinson, 2017), which is regarded as a great

leap from text-centred meanings to the circulation-focused meaning-making. Hall (1991,

p.119) believes that over the course of communicative exchange, it is the encoding of a

message that allows its realisation and transposal within the meaningful discourses, during

which the shaping is heavily influenced by “structures of understanding” and “social and

economic relations”. That is to say, the interpretation of media information involves audience

engagement influenced by the personal identities instead of the sole governance of media-

makers (Woodstock, 2016). He then categorises three possible reading positions (or codes)

toward distinct media texts from the perspective of the audience (Hall, 1991; Jones & Holmes,

2011). While dominant-hegemonic readings are largely in accordance with the hegemonic

ideology incorporated by the encoders, negotiated position and oppositional position reveal

a degree of resistance to the persuasive intentions within the media texts (Woodstock, 2016).

These three codes acknowledge the existing difference between the encoders and the

decoders as the unsymmetrical codes may be inherited during the communication (Hall, 1997).

Additionally, in terms of the encoders, Hall (1973, p.16) assumes the major encoding position

as the hegemonic encoding, which takes the advantage of dominant ideology power to

construct the “preferred reading”.

According to Jones & Holmes (2011), the application of these codes, originated from

semiologist Barthes (1968), in the encoding/decoding model could be seen as a semiology

influence. This could especially be reflected in the three decoding positions which share a
large degree of similarity to William’s encapsulation of hegemony within the culture (William,

1994). Moreover, the four stages of meaning communication, during which “production,

circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction” are sustained, are highly inspired by

Marx’s capital model to diffuse the concepts of ideology and articulation into the audience

research (Jones & Holmes, 2011). By organising the relations within the circuit of

communication, Hall attracts more attention paid to the audience research and sheds light on

the audience effects research by providing a new perspective of viewing the active role of the

audience in the continuous circuit of communication. While Hall originally develops the model

with opposition to the uses and gratifications model, he later changes the direction to rebut

the taken-for-granted transparency within the communication research (Hall, 1973). Due to

the creative analysis on the circulation of meaning, the encoding/decoding model afterwards

becomes the unavoidable discussion and the inspiration towards media effects studies.

Further studies, for example, the circuit of culture (Johnson, 1986), which revises the original

model by integrating the culture studies, and the circuit of media study (D’Acci, 2004, p.431),

which further expands the previous theory to “an integrated approach to media studies”.

When it comes to a digital era, it still remains influential on the studies regarding audience

reception, such as the typology of affordances (Gaver, 1991) and communication as

translation (Conway, 2017).

However, while Hall’s model is regarded as both an exceptional advancement

(Woodstock, 2016) and liberation from the insistence towards the true meaning of messages

in semiology to the reception theory in media studies (Hodkinson, 2017), there remain

unsolved questions within the notion and practice of the encoding/decoding model. With

regard to the model itself, the first concern is linked to a possible contradiction between a
multitude of audience responses and three limited typologies of decoding positions. It is

suggested by Hodkinson (2017) that the vague and ambiguous boundary between a number

of audience reaction in the Morley’s Nationwide Television Studies (1999), may represent an

oversimplification in the three typologisations of encodings invented by Hall. Morley (2006)

also comments that the negotiated decodings may be less valued compared to the

oppositional codes. Furthermore, the provided reading positions in the model could also

potentially exclude the “indifferent audience” (Pasquier, 2003) or “disengaged audience”

(Cardon & Huertin, 2003), who could to a degree refuse or fail to be involved in the decoding

process and thus could not be categorised into any of these three typologies. This assumption

is especially becoming the reality in China’s digital fandom where most fans are likely to react

indifferently to the irrelevant fan communities, thus feeling less affective to the intended

encodings. Yin (2020, p.479) further points out a more interesting fact that on Weibo, the

most popular social media platform in China, the platforms utilise the “traffic data”, mainly

produced by active fans, as a ranking criterion of different fan communities. Thus, fans within

certain communities are calling for contributions to this traffic data and require other fans to

avoid data production to other fandoms. Therefore, it may out of the consideration of the

inadequate typology, Morley (1992, p.12) suggests that there could remain a relatively

complicated classification towards audience readings and the role of broader structure,

through which communication is achieved, should be further explored in relevant studies.

The second limitation relates to the audience decodings. There remains a general,

however, interwoven combination between comprehension and evaluation in the

encoding/decoding model, that is to say, reading positions serves as both ideologically and

contextually (Ross, 2011). Though Morley (2006) recognises that the mixed status of
comprehension and evaluation may require a careful disentanglement, he appears to be

rather cautious for the differentiating procedures need to be patient enough in avoidance of

the evacuation of the cultural power in Hall’s model. Therefore, as discussed further by Ross

(2011), he tries to broaden the original model by extending it into a two-dimension

(ideological and text-relative) model to clarify the intertwined components in the process of

communication interpretation. The third limitation lies behind the underlying consumption

that the encoders’ intention to perform the dominant encoding to the audience and the

relationship between encoders and audience. As Hall (1994) assumes, the dominant ideology

is naturally embedded into most television discourses, therefore, a preferred reading is

originally pre-imbued and thus becoming a property of the text which could be carefully

identified. However, this assumption fails to reflect the circumstance where the encoders may

take a distance from the dominant ideology, on the contrary, they would even convey

negotiated or oppositional positions to the dominant ideology (Wu & Bergman, 2019). Hall

even himself later reflected that the meaning-focused encoding may entail a reconsideration

on the proclaimed interrelationship between encoding and dominant ideology (Hall et al.,

1994). Therefore, by regarding the hegemonic ideology as the nature of preferred reading,

this may lead to ignorance or dismission to the diversity of the encoders and their encodings.

Considering this, according to Ross (2011), the original model could embrace three new

typologies in terms of encoding, identified as negotiated and oppositional encodings. This

limitation could also be expanded to the ideology identification of the audience, which is more

focused on the audience’s conjectures of how the ideology is incorporated rather than the

acceptance or resistance to the encoded message. As demonstrated in the case study on so-

called “mythic plays” featuring China’s anti-Japanese history, one of the unsatisfaction

towards the media production is not about the acceptance of the content, rather a

disagreement on the way that patriotism was depicted (Wu & Bergman, 2019). Ideologically,

the different recognition between media producers and the viewers over the patriotism
application leads the audience to an oppositional position towards the ideology constructed

in the TV, which is different from the oppositional reading as expressed in Hall’s model. Thus,

to adapt to audience’s increasing power over incorporated codes in the digital era, the

encoding/decoding model could involve the decoders’ expectation towards how certain

ideology is encoded as a new dimension in the original model.

From the perspective of the prevailing social media, which exhibits its increasing

interactivity and thus brings out serious challenges to the single-meaning assembly in the

factory of encoding/decoding. The first challenge is relating to the blurring boundary between

production and reception caused by the emergence of interactive media, where multifaced

meaning-making process contradicts with the encoding/decoding model. According to Shaw

(2017), the assumption of a distinctive differentiation process would be difficult to be squared

with the new media environment where interactive communication, such as the social media,

features the interrelationships between the mass individuals. D’Acci (2004) also criticises this

universal differentiation in the process of meaning-making in communication studies creates

potential difficulty to analyse the audience. Furthermore, because of the easily accessible self-

publishing social media, the transformation from the audience into the media producers is

largely encouraged (Rosen, 2006; Bruns, 2008). Thus, the mass individuals as the audience

would not be singularly situated for the multiple identities they behave. Another external

pressure concerns the circulation within a communicative exchange, during which the

presumed dominant code would be largely questioned and extra codings may be generated

compared to the formal analyses on the communication process. This could be practically

examined on social media platforms, for instance, in the studies on Facebook’s newsfeeds,

additional meanings are generated during the circulation (Plamer, 2020). While Hall does
mention the possibility of meaning-making in the process of circulation, he does not foresee

the power of algorithms, which contributes largely to the transformation of user consumption

into newly value-based meaning (Bødker, 2016). Therefore, Bødker (2016, p.415) suggests an

“augmented commodity”, which involves beyond the original information (comments & likes)

to indicate an immersive and autonomous meaning-making journey within the

encoding/decoding model. Thus, it should be necessary to elaborate a further clarification on

the circulation process and perhaps consider a new typology as the “circulation codings” to

the original model.

In addition to the undefinable boundary-making within the process of production-

reception as well as the codings of circulation, a finally unpredicted question is associated with

the systematic coding created by algorithm-based selection and recommendation. This could

be reflected in social media, where user participation is largely needed or even required to

earn commercial profits. Therefore, it is difficult to categorise the encodings of the

information generated by the algorithm for the algorithm performance itself is largely based

on user participation and online behaviour (Palmer, 2020). Furthermore, the extensive

demand of user-generated production on the social media to an extent transfers the selective

power possessed by users to the mega-companies and leads to unconscious self-codings,

which could not be identified in Hall’s model. As suggested in Yin’s (2020) case study on the

digital fandom on Weibo, the social media platform constructs a promising relationship

between fan engagement and commercial advantages to celebrities they support. Thus, while

being informed of increased power over information selection and reception, fans within the

same community are actually being confined within the discipline set by the media market

and collaboratively produce the mass meaning as required by the social media. During this
imperceptible process, the fans are both the encoders and the decoders forced by the

platforms, which could not fit in the encoding/decoding model where meanings are

transported from the encoders to the decoders. On the other hand, in contrast with the

traditional journalism, commercial media production now needs to actively attract the

audience with respect to the audience’s decoding preference, without which the media

products would be buried in the immersive information flows. For instance, Lu (2020)

observes an astonishing discovery that three highly exposed articles on WeChat (one of the

most popular instant-messaging platform), each of which spotlight a distinctive

comprehension regarding the same social events are unexpectedly written by the same team.

Therefore, it would be difficult to identify a specific inscribed decoding from producers in this

example because now they would withdraw their attitudes and cater to audience expectation

in different aspects. Consequently, there may exist a coding preference rather than encodings

in the benefits-driven media industry that entails updates to the encoding/decoding model.

In summary, this essay suggests that Hall’s encoding/decoding model advocates a

systematic understanding of the discursive transformation in-between the communicative

exchange (Palmer, 2020) and demands a thorough and transitional acknowledgement of

relations between “thought and action”, “interpretation and practice” (Woodstock, 2016, p.

407). While it retains its influence on indicating the discursive formation of the media message,

the encoding/decoding model receives extensive challenge to the original typology structure

of codings (Hodkinson, 2017; Wu & Burgman, 2019; Ross, 2011; Morley, 2006) as well as the

external emergence of modern mass media, especially the occurrence of interactive social

media, which presents a tendency not to break rather entangle the circulation process.

Furthermore, this essay also explores the model’s contribution to other scholars, such as
Gaver’s typology of affordances (1991) and D’Acci (2004)’s model of a circuit of media study,

to show its seminal position in communication studies. In conclusion, it would be of

importance to provide Hall’s model with a typology update and reconsider a new circulation

process where the discursive meanings are produced in the media society. Future studies

could recast the examining work with Ross (2011)’s new typologisations of codings and

D’Acci’s (2004) circuit of media study model to revise Hall’s model with regard to the

immersive, interactive and commercial characteristics of media.

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