After reading Stuart Halls essay "Encode/Decode" I did think that it could be 'interesting' in a lot of ways, but that didnt keep it from being ridiculously hard to digest. Maybe its just me; Maybe its because its 3 in the morning. Either way, I had to read alot of it over several times, and some parts of it Ill admit I really didnt read at all. Albeit, what he was discussing was a very prevalant and casually discussed issue. Dont let the wording throw you off, this is something you would see brought up in everyday conversation and seen in various forms of media.
Semiotics, which is the study of signs and symbols in relation to communicative behavior, and the analysis of systems of communication, may help us to more intelligently decipher the encoded symbols thrown at us every day. Of course, how we decode certain things may be completely different from culture to culture, it has been argued that there can be "national" symbols, but this has been concluded with little success. Depending on the cultural mindset of an individual, which varies drastically from country to country and eve region to region, they will perceive symbols extremely different.
Any Art has an idea encoded into it by the creator, this original idea, when presented to the public, is decoded into a different meaning. This is seen very strongly in television. Although the images, an image of a cow for example, may look and sound like a cow, it is not a cow. Art can be deceptive in this fashion.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I too found this article to be really interesting, but also bit hard to diggest. The author states, "certain codes, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed-the effect of an articulation between sign and
referent-but to be 'naturally' given." (pg 95) In this article Stuart Hall focuses on how messages are produced and spread (encoding and decoding), he argues that mass communication is a primary process of reality construction, that this is mantained because of its dominance and for that reason, these messages are produced and reproduced in society and at the same time made to appear natural. Hall refers to each stage of communication as "moments" that are independent from one another and that each play a particular role in sending and receiving messages. Encoding and decoding is our ideology of how we see things.
The visual signs we see on television must not be understood as reality, rather it should only be seen as a representation of it. According to Hall the audience is both encoding and decoding the messages they have been sent, and this is because what is been produced are ideas gathered from society.
I really liked this article and the discussion we had in class really brought to light alot of the ideas of encoding and decoding as well. The communication of images and things we see period was really interesting. On like how we interpret it.
Post a Comment