In the class, I learned that nowadays, we accept information not simply by sending and receiving information, but that there is a process of encoding and decoding in the transmission of information. According to Stuart Hall’s coding-decoding theory, the production of meaning depends on the interpretation of events, which are composed of codes, “codes are how power and ideology express meaning in various special discourses“, and the transmitter blends power and ideology in the form of codes in the content of the communication.

Firstly, the communicator encodes the content through different forms, such as text, pictures, and video. Because the information recipients are diverse, the transmission of codes will produce different “decoding” in the process of reading the same news in combination with different growth backgrounds and values. While the audience is decoding, they can give full play to their subjective initiative in decoding. Just like the root system of a plant, which has thousands of bifurcations of opinion, and even when starting at a single node, there will be moments of “bifurcation”. This process leads to a misleading reception of information and a deviation in the center of gravity ((relative to the intention of the transmitter), which will cause a serious impact on the accuracy of the information reception. A new decoding pattern will be presented that mixes multiple interpretations.

In a Chinese people’s livelihood news program called “1818 Golden Eye”, reporting an accident———Xiao Wu went on the program as a victim to claim compensation because he failed to get her hair cut and eyebrows tattooed. Such a report that originally belonged to the social and livelihood issues of the interview, the subject matter went astray because of Xiao Wu’s humorous appearance. The communicator originally hoped to restore the process of the incident by way of video interview, to help Xiao Wu obtain the deserved compensation, and remind people in the society not to accept unreasonable sales. However, due to some “special factors”, the audience’s “non-dominant decoding” is caused. People turn their attention to Xiao Wu’s humorous looks, which makes Xiao Wu unexpectedly popular.

Last year there was a heated topic on the Chinese Internet # Litang Dingzhen #. The boy’s popularity is also due to the “non-dominant decoding”. On the day of video was shot, Ding Zhen wanted to go to the village to buy noodles, but inadvertently broke into the photographer’s lens, with handsome looks, Ding Zhen quickly attracted the attention of the majority of netizens, and the video fired a mess, a single video gain more than 2.7 million numbers of likes. And this video was originally to promote the beautiful scenery of Tibetan areas, the great rivers and mountains of China, but because of people’s wrong attention, the visual stimulation brought by his good looks in the first place, and accidentally popularised a teenager.

The popularity of these “new top streams” is purely “accidental”, which is out of the intention of the original communicator, so the event shows a completely different development orientation. Therefore, a completely unexpected communication landscape is derived based on the original communication content. There is a dominant interpretation of meaning decoding by the audience.

So do we need to reduce the incidence of “non-dominant decoding”? We need to keep a balance between the pros and cons of “non-dominant decoding”.

Reference list

Cotta, C., Sevaux, M. and Sörensen, K. (2008). Adaptive and multilevel metaheuristics. Berlin: Springer.

Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Birmingham England: Centre For Cultural Studies, University Of Birmingham.

he, yingzi (2020). The Piercing Golden Eye. [online] The World of Chinese. Available at: https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2020/10/the-piercing-golden-eye/ [Accessed 19 Nov. 2023].

Tone, S. (2021). The World of Ding Zhen. [online] #SixthTone. Available at: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1008720 [Accessed 19 Nov. 2023].