„Model kodowania i dekodowania” Stuarta Halla w teoriach komunikacji

Abstrakt

S. Hall’s theoretical proposal of how media messages are produced, disseminated,and interpreted is his original contribution to the thought of the BirminghamCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies — CCCS. The CCCS became famous forits mixing theory with ideology or assuming that there is no gap between thoughtand action. The idea itself had been drawn from Marxian and Neo-Marxian theories.The objective behind a knowledge about to come to light was to struggle against theothers no less biased and particular than it itself. A. Gramsci’s thesis was that themain battlefield was culture, where two contradictory ideologies — hegemonic andcounterhegemonic — clashed incessantly. These ideas were interwoven by S. Hallinto his own model of coding and decoding. He claimed that there was no simpleidentity of the contents between encoding media messages and their decoding,because the cultural background, economic and social position both of broadcastersand audiences were different. The decoding was not passive but able to extract andchange the meaning of a message in a way which suited their life experience, socialideas, economic interest or even languages. The English scientist postulated thatwithin the media communication process there were three main stances towardsdecoding: the dominant-hegemonic or preferred position, the negotiated position,and the oppositional position. In spite of more than thirty years after it emergedthe model has still had some interesting features which might make it inspiring formodern studies of communication. It is largely because of its high theoretical leveland is due to its practical possibilities to understand the process of creating meaningwithin coding and decoding with regard to the social-cultural background.