Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

electronic publishing media n. using digital means to disseminate what was formerly published in printed form. Thus, newspapers, journals, and books are all now published electronically and are available online for access by laptop computer, tablet and smart-phone but are also available in other digital formats such as CD and DVD. mmo

emergent culture media n. the result of processes in which new values, beliefs, meanings and forms of social practice are continually being created within the cultural field. The term derives from the Welsh cultural theorist, Raymond Williams (1921-1988), who contrasted it with residual culture. mmo

encoding media n. the process whereby information from a source is transformed into signs, characters, symbols or other forms of representation for the purposes of communication. The reverse process whereby signs or symbols are transformed into meanings or information interpretable by a receiver is known as decoding. Initial accounts of encoding and decoding assumed that the two processes of encoding and decoding were broadly congruent and complementary. However, beginning in the early 1970s the Afro-Caribbean and British sociologist and cultural theorist, Stuart Hall (, proposed a model of encoding/decoding that stressed the situated and contextualized character of the two processes, emphasizing that the output from the code could be quite different from the input under the real, historical circumstances of use. Hall suggested, indeed, that decoding was an active process in which audiences may interpret in three quite different ways. In the first, they may share the dominant code adopted in encoding and decode the message or text within the terms set by that code. In the second way, however, they may decode within the terms of the dominant code, while simultaneously ‘negotiating’ and integrating discrepant elements into the decoding process. In the third way, audiences may reject the terms of the dominant code and decode the message or text in a globally oppositional fashion, finding in it a meaning radically counter to what was intended. These three ways of decoding underpin respectively what came to be described as the dominant or preferred reading, the negotiated reading, and the oppositional or resistive reading. Hall’s model has been highly influential and has been considered one of the key conceptual frameworks of the field of cultural studies. mmo