When Stuart Hall published Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse in 1973, he was challenging a dominant model of media communication that treated audiences as passive recipients of a fixed message. In that model, the sender (say, a news anchor or an advertiser) transmits a message, and the audience “receives” it just as it was intended.
But Hall, drawing on semiotics and Marxist theory, insisted that meaning isn’t merely transmitted—it’s constructed. In other words, media doesn’t just tell us what’s happening in the world. It shapes how we make sense of it. And crucially, we—the audience—aren’t just empty vessels. We interpret, negotiate, and sometimes resist what we’re being shown.
This is the core of Hall’s encoding/decoding model, one of his most influential contributions to media theory. And in a digital age where news cycles are memes and anyone with a phone can remix the message, his insights feel startlingly current.
Encoding, Decoding, and the Three Readings
Hall proposed that media texts are first encoded with meaning by their producers. This encoding includes assumptions about the audience—what they believe, what they value, what they’ll recognize. But once the media content is released, the audience decodes it, and here’s the twist: decoding is not guaranteed to align with the producer’s intent.
Hall outlined three potential readings:
-
Dominant-hegemonic reading: The audience accepts the intended meaning.
-
Negotiated reading: The audience partially agrees but also resists or adapts parts of the message.
-
Oppositional reading: The audience understands the intended meaning but rejects it entirely, reinterpreting it from a resistant standpoint.
Take a modern example: A luxury brand launches an ad campaign showcasing diversity. The dominant reading sees it as progress; the negotiated reading might appreciate the visibility but see it as tokenism; the oppositional reading calls it out as performative branding. The ad is the same—but its meaning shifts depending on who’s watching and how they’re positioned socially and politically.
From Broadcast to Algorithm
In Hall’s day, media was centralized—broadcast television, mass print journalism, public figures with singular platforms. His model helped explain how ideology was embedded in even the most seemingly neutral of messages: news segments, sitcoms, advertisements.
Today, we’re in a decentralized media environment, but the stakes are eerily similar. Think of viral TikToks that spark political debates, or cable news soundbites that are chopped, memed, and recontextualized across Twitter (now X), Reddit, or YouTube. Meaning becomes even more unstable, even more contested.
But Hall’s model doesn’t break here—it expands. In an age of participatory media, the audience is not just decoding but also re-encoding. Every remix, duet, subtweet, or stitched video is a layer of interpretation and resistance. Hall gave us a way to see these cultural practices not as noise but as part of the ideological struggle over meaning.
Media Literacy as Political Literacy
What Hall’s theory underscores is that media literacy isn’t just about spotting misinformation. It’s about recognizing that all media is ideological. Not in the conspiratorial sense, but in the Gramscian one: media helps organize consensus around certain values, norms, and worldviews.
Whether it’s how immigration is framed on Fox News, how climate change is aestheticized on Instagram, or how influencers narrate mental health, we’re not just receiving information—we’re navigating encoded visions of the world. To decode media critically is to see the politics beneath the pixels.
Why It Still Matters
In the 2020s, we are all readers and writers of media. We repost, reframe, subtweet, translate. Hall’s model helps explain how a single clip can mean liberation to one group and moral decline to another. It helps us ask: Whose voice is encoded here? Who is the imagined audience? What world is being made visible—or invisible?
Hall never believed that decoding was enough. But he knew it was where politics began.
See also: Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'"
