ABSTRACT
A concept from Umberto Eco, identifying a mismatch or asymmetry of meaning between sender (encoder) and receiver (decoder) of any message, from ancient art to contemporary media. Eco himself used the term in a ‘semiotic inquiry into the television message’, first published in 1965 in Italian, a pioneering attempt to apply semiotics to mass communication (Eco, 1972). He suggested that ‘aberrant decoding’ was an accident in pre-industrial societies, an exception from the expectation by speakers and artists that their own communities would normally ‘get’ what they were on about.
