Hall thinks,Although the mass media is the main tool for controlling ideology, the response well of the audience to the mass media content is not completely passive. The audience decodes the “ruling discourse” in the mass media in their own way, so the decoding is also diverse.
Hall divided the decoding into three modes:
The first model is preference interpretation, in which the audience interprets the information in the original meaning of the coder, so the intention of the coder and the meaning understood by the decoder are exactly the same
The second is compromise interpretation, which means that the coders and decoders bargain and dispute the meaning of the content The third is oppositional interpretation, where the audience deviates from the coders intentions. The disagreement between the two sides led to an antagonistic situation.
I personally believe that [Gundam] is a very profound work, which actually contains various meanings that the author wants to convey. Gundam is not just an animated film about machines and battles between machines. For me or many Gundam enthusiasts, this may be a preference for interpretation. I believe that Gundam has the spirit of resistance that the author wants to convey, the determination to oppose war, and the hope that people can understand each other. Although Gundam endowed the Earth Federation with the power to turn the tide of the war, the war did not have a good outcome, and eventually someone would be injured.
In terms of compromise interpretation, the decoders may not care about the meaning of Gundam at all, some people just appreciate the cool appearance of Gundam, and some people are not interested in it, thinking that animation is always a pastime, there is no need to in-depth understanding, they feel that there is no substantive meaning.
Finally, there is the opposite interpretation. This group of audience think that the concept conveyed by the author is completely wrong. They may think that Gundam is a horror theme, because the animation will contain pictures such as blood and death, which does not play a positive meaning, so they do not support it. Like some parents, they don’t want their children to see these images.
In conclusion,this is the first time for me to learn about encoding and decoding and try to analyze it.I will try to use these three modes to analyze my favorite works and get new cognition and resonance from different angles.
List of references:
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That’s a really good article, The article clearly explains stuart hall’s theory of encoding and decoding, which also gives me a clearer understanding of the theory. I also liked your example of gundam, where you used the fact that the crowd had two completely different understandings of gundam to make the audience understand encoding and decoding in layman’s terms.
Thank you!