Introducing a ‘cultural studies’ approach to television texts: Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ paper. This session is based on this seminal, but complex, paper, which tries to understand the production and circulation in more ‘realistic’ way, admitting the complexities that come with understanding any mass media text.
Read through the (quite difficult) paper (pdf below); think about how this is different to the things we’ve looked at previously. This paper is hard work but rewards attempts understand what its argument is, and what the further implications of that argument are.
Original citation
Hall, S. (1973) Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham
Appears in many collections, including
Hall, S. (2000) “Encoding/Decoding”. In Marris, P. and Thornham, S. (Eds.) Media Studies: A Reader. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.