Page 16 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ABERRANT DECODING

ABERRANT DECODING

A concept originating with Umberto Eco, identifying a mismatch of
meaning between sender (encoder) and receiver (decoder) of any
message, from ancient art to contemporary media. Eco himself used
the term in a ‘semiotic inquiry into the television message’, first
published in 1965 in Italian, a pioneering attempt to apply semiotics to
mass communication (Eco, 1972). He suggested that ‘aberrant
decoding’ was an accident in pre-industrial societies, an exception
to the expectation of speakers and artists that their own communities
would normally ‘get’ what they were talking about. There were four
classes of exception to this rule:

. people who didn’t know the language (what meanings did the
Greeks, and then everyone till Jean-Francois Champollion, ascribe
¸
to Egyptian hieroglyphics?);
. people from future generations (what meanings did medieval
Christians ascribe to Greek and Roman art?);
. people from different belief systems (what meanings do modern
tourists ascribe to the stained glass windows of cathedrals such as
Chartres?);
. people from different cultures (what meanings do white people
ascribe to Aboriginal art?).

However, and herein lies the importance of the concept, Eco argued
that contemporary media such as television are communicative codes
in which aberrant decoding is the norm, not the exception. TV
communicators know a priori that their code is not shared by all the
receivers.
Eco proposed therefore that research into television required three
phases:

. a semiotic analysis of television ‘messages’ to establish the codes
used by the transmitting organisation and producers, and the
references audiences were expected to have in order to decode
them;
. field research into ‘howthe messages, previously analysed, have in
fact been received in selected sample situations’;
. a comparative analysis to determine the extent to which the two
sets of results tally.

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