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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 55

The model was also central to information theory, with Shannon and Weaver as early
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examples. While it can conveniently apply to certain aspects of modern mass media,
it cannot fully conceptualize media use in general. Forms of communication other
than press, radio and television problematize the frozen dualism of production and
consumption, sender and receiver. In everyday dialogues face to face or on the phone,
participants rapidly move in and out of the roles of speaker and listener. In interactive
Internet or computer game uses, the programmers and the multiple users are all
engaged in ways that are difficult to disentangle according to such a simple linear
formula. Also, in poetic genres, it is more relevant to ask what people in a certain
context make out of texts than what the author originally intended to express. The
‘hypodermic needle’ or ‘injection theory’ of media effects was soon questioned and
modified in order to include contexts, feedback and interaction, but its basic divisions
of sender, text and receiver remain in force, in theories of uses-and-gratifications as
well as in Roman Jakobson’s linguistic-literary model that inspired Roland Barthes,
Umberto Eco and other semioticians. 27
Serious attempts by British and American cultural studies scholars in the 1970s to
distance themselves from the transmission view of communication nevertheless
leaned heavily on semiotic ideas through which this view tended to sneak back in. 28
Stuart Hall’s influential encoding/decoding model depicted media production as
structured by specific cultural, economic and technical frameworks, leading to an
‘encoding’ of meaning structures into a programme or text as a ‘meaningful’
discourse. In reception, the audience then reconstructs a set of meanings through
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‘decoding’ that same text, framed partly by other contextual frameworks. This left
room for a divergence between the two moments, but still retained a tendency to
conceive of communication as a transmission of a meaningful message from fixed
producers to receivers, and of media use as an unpackaging (decoding) of given
contents. This may fit reasonably well for how, for instance, news journalism is
supposed to function in its idealized form, but is unsuitable as a general model. Hall
later developed a model of ‘articulation’, where locally specific historical configura-
tions of texts and readers link meanings to texts. This is more consistent with the
hermeneutic model of communication proposed here.
To take one example: who or what decides the meaning of any music video? Is it
the artist, the music industry, or the totality of its time of origin – what Raymond
Williams discussed as the ‘structure of feeling’ at the moment of textual produc-
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tion? The answer must be, all and none of them! The meaning of any media text is
never definitely fixed, as long as it remains circulating as a living cultural text. It
therefore cannot be reduced to the original intentions behind it, whether they are
analysed as residing in an individual artist, producing institutions, or the spirit of the
times. Interpretation gives special attention to all of these but allows the text’s
meaning to evolve over history. For people who live decades or even centuries later,
the meaning of an old text is never quite the same as it was for its original writers or
readers. Though this may worry historians who want to find out a true first meaning,
it is for many others who read the text no big issue, in particular not for fictional

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