Encoding, Decoding and Representation

Unlike the Frankfurt school that highlights the governing properties of culture, Hall focuses on the taken for granted aspect of communication — the audience. The audience interprets codes that may contain different meanings from the ones sent from the producers. Moreover, the distortions and misunderstandings are situated in the “structural differences of relation and position between broadcasters and audiences” (510). In class, we considered some examples of these disjunctures. Particularly, the advertisements or messages that were criticized because the message encoded are read differently for the audience. I argue that processes of encoding and decoding facilitated the demands for representation in cultural productions.

As Hall points out, the message encoded is not only language or imagery communicated. Instead, visual codes are sometimes embedded in “naturalized” forms that appear as natural recognition(511). That is the “dominant-hegemonic position” of the encoding and decoding process described by Hall (515). An evident example is the ideal house-making wife represented in television and popular media in the 1950s and 1950s and 1960s. Despite its popularity, the housewife was inaccessible for working-class women and women of color. The encoded messages about natural differences between men and women assisted patriarchal ideologies. With the traditional broadcasting media, contestation of the encoded ideology took place in political mobilizations. To a certain extent, the Frankfurt school’s argument about a powerful cultural industry that serves governing political function still holds.

The new communicative means bring out a new kind of politics. Rather than being broadcasted, social medias today allows participations that reshape representation. The dominant racial, gender, and sexuality orders in mass media started incorporating representations of racial, gender, and sexual minorities. The audience is able to contend the reproduction of dominant ideology with social media and new forms of communications. Of course, representation efforts in popular media are embedded in existing “material and institutional hierarchies of privilege and power based on class (middle class), race (whiteness), gender(patriarchal), and sexual (heterosexual) differences” (Gray, 10). Representations are still in question given the broader structures of inequality. Shows like Will and Grace or Queer Eyes may appear to represent queerness, yet they impose a new kind of dominance of, gay, middle class, white, cis-gendered, and educated. Under hierarchies of structured representation, the crux of representation becomes more complicated: Who encoded to represent in mass media? Who is decoded to be representing? How do encoders react to the demands of decoders?

In the new age, the diagram of encoding and decoding may not end at decoding. Their relations may be more dialectical than unidirectional despite the much powerful position that encoders occupy. Meanwhile, demands for representation could be recoded to encoders. Similar to Hall’s theory, encoders are likely to reabsorb and compromise representation and encode a vision of representation still situated in the hierarchical structures of inequality. There is no easy process that can capture the complexity of representation in modern mass media. However, the meanings of representation do differ between encoders and decoders. Perhaps, mass media will absorb demands of representation to its fullest extent, and produce something that represents everyone. But until that day, the politics of representation will still be crucial and relevant.