LATEST THEORIES ON INFORMATION AND MEDIA

HALL’S THEORY (ENCODING/DECODING MODEL OF COMMUNICATION)

 It was first developed by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in 1973.
Hall proposed that audience members can play an active role in
decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts, and
might be capable of changing messages themselves through collective
action.
 In simpler terms, encoding/decoding is the translation of a message
that is easily understood. When you decode a message, you extract the
meaning of that message in ways that make sense to you. Decoding
has both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication: Decoding
behavior without using words means observing body language and its
associated emotions. Decoding is all about the understanding of what
someone already knows, based on the information given throughout
the message being received. Whether there is a large audience or
exchanging a message to one person, decoding is the process of
obtaining, absorbing, understanding, and sometimes using the
information that was given throughout a verbal or non-verbal message.

AGENDA – SETTING THEORY

 This theory was formally developed by Max McCombs and Donald
Shaw in a study on the 1968 American presidential election.
 It stated that mass media determine the issues that concern the public rather than the
public’s views. Under this theory, the issues that receive the most attention from media
become the issues that the public discusses, debates, and demands action on. This
means that the media is determining what issues and stories the public thinks about.
Therefore, when the media fails to address a particular issue, it becomes marginalized in
the minds of the public.