Encoding, Decoding

It could be that because this article took me forever to read I found Hall’s style of writing to become annoying. Instead of being clear cut with a concept that’s already difficult enough to understand due to it’s layering of concepts, he makes it harder than it needs to be. He constantly has sentences that show what something is not doing before finally telling us what it is doing. One shorter example of this is on page 97, “The terms ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’, then, are merely useful analytic tools for distinguishing, in particular contexts, between not the presence/absence of ideology in language but the different levels at which ideologies and discourses intersect.” And that is just a small part of his entire argument of what denotation and connotation are and are not.

Of course, hidden beneath these complex sentences, large words, and what seems like a never ending article, is one concept that I found to be so simplistic that he attempts to complicate. Within his encoding decoding essay, he talks about how the things we see on a screen are not actually those things, however, they represent those things. He uses the example of a cow, while we may see a cow on a screen; it is not an actual cow. Later on, sticking to a similar ideal, he then goes on to use a sweater as an example and all the different meanings that can come with it. He says while is it not a sweater, yet presenting the image and ideal of a sweater, it can offer different meanings such as what weather is coming or a romantic walk in the woods to name a few.

This ties directly into his use of semiotics, which is defined (according to dictionary.com) as “the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior; the analysis of systems of communication, as language, gestures, or clothing.” For Hall, he not only breaks down communication in the forms of mass media, he even goes deeper to set up into stages of how communication takes place and how it can be interpreted and possibly where the interpretation can be changed. As mentioned above, he uses the example of the sweaters as one way mass communication can be interpreted a number of ways.

Odds are, there is a lot more that I just am not catching in this article. Be it that his style of writing has distracted me to the point I can’t grasp the information he’s trying to send me (maybe he should’ve encoded this article a lot easier for the rest of us to decode) or perhaps I’m too tired to continue to dissect this article. Whatever the case may be, I do hope that I get a clearer understanding before class or during the class lecture. Oh yeah, and I pray to god there isn’t a quiz on this one.