I took the time to find a copy of “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (Hall, 1973) and read it through to make sure that I had adequately understood the author’s concepts and how he had arrived at them. Stephen Bull (2010: 70) places his reference to Hall’s work within the context of a discussion on the use of photography in advertising, but it seems to me that we do not have to look for a commercial purpose to see how images are likely always promoting a particular view of the world. Money might not be changing hands, but some set of values is being “sold.” I think that the approach outlined in Barthes’ “Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes and Sontag, 1989) that I read during the Context and Narrative unit is a helpful tool for looking carefully at how the elements within an image combine to create meaning and how that meaning supports a particular view or even ideology.
But this is not quite where Hall is going. Instead, he asserts that viewers accept the “message” of the image to varying degrees. Some take the message as presented (dominant/preferred); others partially (negotiated) and yet others reject it outright (oppositional). As Bull points out (2010: 70), Hall contends that viewers are not simply passive recipients of the message(s) in an image but engage with it.
I think that this is a helpful distinction to make and that it is important to recognize that different audiences will engage differently with images, not just across cultures but even within them. At the same time, I wonder if Hall gives too much credit to the viewers he imagines: are we all as critical and active at reading as we should be? Businesses spend enormous sums on advertising because it is so effective, and it is effective because it successfully and consistently conveys the desired message (buy this! vote for this!) to the desired audience, often below the level of conscious interaction. I think this is an area where psychology might have a lot to teach media studies (I suspect that it already has done and that I simply lack knowledge of who the major thinkers might be in such a discussion).
Another element that I would like to see discussed at more length is the impact of time. Hall’s essay is concerned with the reading of an image upon first viewing, but it would be interesting to see how images become more or less accepted over time, both with a mass audience but also within individuals: how do we re-read familiar images as we gain new experiences and understandings? In the context of The Self and the Other, for example, can portrayal of The Other change our understandings of the world? And can our evolving understandings of the world affect the way we read portrayals of The Other? I think the answer is likely yes, but it may be due to a combination of both conscious (active) and subconscious activity (not passive, but below the level of cognition and appealing to existing fears, desires and biases) in reading.
References
Barthes, R. and Sontag, S. (1989) Selected writings. Fontana.
Bull, S. (2010) Photography. London ; New York: Routledge.
Hall, S. (1973) ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’ Council of Europe Colloquy on ‘Training in the Critical Reading of Televisual Language’. Leicester: (s.n.).
The Self and the Other 