ABSTRACT
Theorists of television have for a long time been interested in determining how audiences understand the codes of television programmes. An influential contribution to this, called the ‘encoding-decoding’ model, has been developed in order to connect the kind of detailed analysis of programmes discussed in Chapter 4 with research into the viewing practices of real audiences. This work by the media academic Stuart Hall (1980) argued that programmes contain dominant ideological discourses that are encoded in programmes through the production practices of programme-makers which result in conventional forms of narrative structure, invitations to the audience to identify with particular characters and the telling of stories that reflect taken-for-granted social meanings. Hall was interested in the factors that might affect the encoding of these meanings and also how audiences might decode them. Since the images and sounds of television are polysemic, it can never be guaranteed that audiences will make sense of the programme in a way that is consistent with the meanings encoded in it. Hall argued that each television programme contains a ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ reading, and thus limits the range of ways in which audiences can interpret it.
