ABSTRACT
BARKER and Timberg’s history of what they call encoding research usefully organizes some of the most interesting recent scholarship on television. In particular, it synthesizes contemporary work in ways that show clearly productive avenues for the future. But it also ignores crucial dimensions of much of the work it summarizes, especially the political stakes in television research and for viewers as well. Like much recent U.S. mass communication research on television, it borrows from poststructuralism, film studies, and cultural studies, taking socially critical theories and approaches out of context, replacing them within the seemingly neutral, objectivist discourse of social science research. So in the space available to us here, we will sketch some of the context for issues of encoding and decoding, and some of the consequences of ignoring that context in an overview that represents itself as comprehensive.
