Week 5 Readings

Stuart Hall’s "Encoding, Decoding"
Jean Baudrillard's "The Ecstasy of Communication"

"Encoding, Decoding" discusses the structure of communication in television from sender to receiver. Messages from the sender are encoded to fit the technology and cultural milieu of broadcast television. Decoding of the message by the receiver is a relatively autonomous process, but the level of equivalence between the sender and receiver determines how much information is transferred and how it is translated. Codes set a standard or expected way for information to be sent and received. People may operate within the dominant codes (the expected way of communicating), they may negotiate with the codes (extracting the dominant message, but applying it to local conditions), or they may oppose the codes (extracting the dominant message but reading it with an alternative frame of reference).

Codes are unavoidable in communication. We use codes to present information to others in a way that we expect they will understand. Stuart Hall, the 'author' of the 'article' uses 'single quotes' around 'words' and 'phrases' often to 'highlight' certain 'ideas' and sometimes to 'distance himself' from the words located 'within the single quotes’. The use of single quotes is a type of coding used by the author to identify words essential to the points that he is making and also to identify ‘lingo’ and ‘clichés’ used by others. This coding is used by Hall in hopes that the reader will be able to ‘decode’ the key ideas presented in the essay. In some places the single quotes serve to identify common phrases that the author might not like to use, yet the phrases accurately describe a concept and act as a common point of reference that the reader may readily identify.

In "The Ecstasy of Communication" Jean Baudrillard describes the excessiveness of communication found in present society. There is a collapse of space, where sounds and images of almost anything are available wherever there is a screen or a speaker. Everything becomes visible (even the invisible) and is reduced and distilled into images for distribution and mass consumption. Baudrillard writes: “That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That’s obscenity.”

Baudrillard wrote this before the advent of the Internet and so-called ‘reality’ television, which has elevated the ‘ecstasy’ of communication to a ‘manic frenzy’ of communication. Information about almost anything is available by tapping out a few words on a computer keyboard, it being presented in simplified words and images. We can peek into the actual lives (and more commonly created/sensationalized lives) of complete strangers from the comfort of our living rooms.