Meaning and semiotics

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Cultural reading of images

Lesson 6 of 9 in Meaning and semiotics.

Stuart Hall's Encoding/Decoding Model but it's easier to understand · Barley Make Video
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Stuart Hall en.wikipedia.org argued in a 1973 essay on television discourse that a message is encoded by its makers and decoded by its audience, and that these are two different operations rather than one. His encoding and decoding model en.wikipedia.org sets out three positions a viewer can take up. The dominant-hegemonic reading takes the message in the terms it was sent. The negotiated reading accepts the general frame while carving out exceptions for the viewer's own situation. The oppositional reading understands everything and refuses it.

iconlooks like itindexpoints at itsymbolagreed to mean itonly the first one works without being taughtmost identity lives in the third
Icon, index and symbol: a drawing of fire, smoke meaning fire, and a word meaning fire.
A woman in a red and gold sari with a green blouse stands at a stone balustrade in a garden, palms pressed together, looking up at a large white swan flying overhead with its beak open. Lotus pads and fallen petals lie on the flagstones; the print is signed Ravi Varma at lower right.
A print after Raja Ravi Varma's painting of Damayanti speaking to a swan. Its reds, golds and greens make a ready palette, and its story reads differently to different viewers.Hamsa Damayanti Samvada, oleograph after the painting. Raja Ravi Varma, printed by the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press.Wikimedia Commons/Public domain
A woman in a red sari sits on a yellow chair holding a small mirror while a barber in a striped white dhoti and cap leans in to clean her ear. Both figures are painted in flat yellow with grey shading and long swept outlines, and the paper around them is left completely bare.
A Kalighat painting of a barber cleaning a woman's ear. The paper around the two figures is left empty, and that emptiness is what makes them stand out.Barber Cleaning a Woman's Ear. Unrecorded Kalighat painter, Calcutta. Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003.117.Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003.117/CC0 1.0
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “What the makers put into the message. The only part you control.”

    • Encoding
    • Denotation
    • Arbitrary
    • Signified
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “What the audience takes out of it. A separate operation, performed by people you have never met.”

    • Decoding
    • Juxtaposition
    • Visual rhetoric
    • Fusion
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Understanding a message perfectly well and rejecting it, using a frame of reference the sender did not supply.”

    • Oppositional reading
    • Denotation
    • Arbitrary
    • Signified

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