In Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding,” he asserts that “a ‘raw’ historical event cannot, in that form, transmitted by, say, a television newscast” (91-92). While I do think that this process of encoding and decoding still holds weight in the 21st century, since (arguably) we are still a society driven by mass media, how could this statement possibly be challenged or nuanced by the rise of social media, where, hypothetically, we could have historical events broadcasted from many different sources?
“The functioning of codes on the decoding side will frequently assume the status of naturalized perceptions. This leads us to think that the visual sign for ‘cow’ actually is (rather than represents) the animal, cow. But if we think of the visual representation of a cow in manual or animal husbandry— and even more, the linguistic sign ‘cow’— we can see that both, in different degrees, are arbitrary with respect to the concept of the animal they represent.” (95-95)
When reading Hall’s usage of the “cow” as example, how does this passage fit in with our previous week’s discussion of structuralism/post-structuralism? How does encoding-decoding elaborate on structuralist and post-structuralist theory?
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