The encoding/decoding model of communication emerged in rough and general form in 1948 in Claude E. Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," where it was part of a technical schema for designating the technological encoding of signals. Gradually, it was adapted by communications scholars, most notably Wilbur Schramm, in the 1950s, primarily to explain how mass communications could be effectively transmitted to a public, its meanings intact by the audience (i.e., decoders).[1] As the jargon of Shannon's information theory moved into semiotics, notably through the work of thinkers Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco, who in the course of the 1960s began to put more emphasis on the social and political aspects of encoding.[2] It became much more widely known, and popularised, when adapted by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in 1973, for a conference addressing mass communications scholars. In a Marxist twist on this model, Stuart Hall's study, titled the study 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.' offered a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated, and interpreted.[3] Hall proposed that audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts and capability of changing messages through collective action.
Thus, encoding/decoding is the translation needed for a message to be easily understood. When you decode a message, you extract the meaning of that message in ways to simplify it. Decoding has both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication: Decoding behavior without using words, such as displays of non-verbal communication. There are many examples, including observing body language and its associated emotions, e.g. monitoring signs when someone is upset, angry, or stressed where they use excessive hand/arm movements, crying, and even silence. Moreover, there are times when an individual can send a message across to someone, the message can be interpreted differently from person to person. Decoding is all about understanding others, based on the information given throughout the message being received. Whether there is a large audience or exchanging a message to one person, decoding is the process of obtaining, absorbing and sometimes utilizing information that was given throughout a verbal or non-verbal message.
Since advertisements can have multiple layers of meaning, they can be decoded in various ways and can mean something different to different people.[4]
"The level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive fields of meaning and association, is the point where already coded signs intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional more active ideological dimensions."
— Stuart Hall, 1980, "Encoding/decoding."[3]