'decodings do not follow inevitably from encodings' In his essay, originally published as 'Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse' in 1973 the British sociologist Stuart Hall proposed a model of mass communication which highlighted the importance of active interpretation within relevant codes. In contrast to the earlier models, Hall thus gave a significant role to the 'decoder' as well as to the 'encoder'. Hall referred to various phases in the Encoding/Decoding model of communication as moments. John Corner's definitions for the term "moments" (Corner 1983, 266): the moment of encoding: 'the institutional practices and organizational conditions and practices of production'; the moment of the text: 'the... symbolic construction, arrangement and perhaps performance... The form and content of what is published or broadcast'; and the moment of decoding: 'the moment of reception [or] consumption... by... the reader/hearer/viewer' which is regarded by most theorists as 'closer to a form of "construction"' than to 'the passivity... suggested by the term "reception"' Mass media codes offer their readers social identities which some may adopt as their own. But readers do not necessarily accept such codes. Umberto Eco uses the term 'aberrant decoding' to refer to a text which has been decoded by means of a different code from that used to encode it (Eco 1965). Eco describes as 'closed' those texts which show a strong tendency to encourage a particular interpretation - in contrast to more 'open' texts (Eco 1981). He argues that mass media texts tend to be 'closed texts', and because they are broadcast to heterogeneous audiences diverse decodings of such texts are unavoidable. Class assignment (group work, done orally): Watch the video and describe what you have seen in terms of encoding/decoding communication model. Can this situation be considered as a metaphor?