Page 46 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CODE

simply the form messages would take for transmission through a
channel. Clearly that model was based on telegraphy (Morse code) and
telephony, where the code comprised not what was said by the caller,
but the electronic form taken by soundwaves through the telephone
wire. This scientific/mechanical notion of code has driven develop-
ments in computing, notably the writing of code for software
applications, and in telecommunications (mobiles, G4).
Code was taken up in linguistics, media studies and semiotics. An
early pioneer in the field was the Swiss linguistic theorist Ferdinand de
Saussure in the first decade of the twentieth century. Saussure wanted
to study language scientifically, but was faced with an almost infinite
jumble and variety of actual speech. Instead he looked for whatever it
was that enabled utterances to be produced – and ‘decoded’ – in a
coherent and systematic form. Listeners needed to be able to
understand sounds in a given combination that they’d never heard
before, and to bypass the fact that everyone’s voice is unique (including
accent, intonation, speed, clarity of diction, etc.), so that physically the
sounds heard are always unique too. The key was ‘code’: the
generative system of rules of combination (grammar) that allowed
elements (lexical items such as words) to be selected, combined and
used to produce new, hitherto unuttered speech. Hearers, sharing the
code, ‘hear’ what the code says rather than merely what the speaker
says, so variations can simply be filtered out.
Codes allowboth combination and organisation – words chosen
from a paradigm or list of possible choices can be strung together in a
syntagm or chain, but that string is itself rule-governed as to its
organisation. In a standard sentence a subject, verb and object are the
minimum requirement. You can choose between different words, but
the lexical items chosen have to do the right work in the right order.
You can say ‘I love you’. But you can’t say ‘You love I’ or ‘Love you I’:
they don’t mean the same even though the same words are chosen.
Proper ‘coding’ requires attention to the organisation of elements
chosen.
Taking that notion a stage further, many socially organised practices
can be referred to as a code: there are aesthetic codes, behavioural
codes, codes of conduct, decency codes ... all the way down to zip
codes. In each case what is referred to is an established (shared)
understanding of what is appropriately associated with what, according
to rules of choice and chain.
It may be that some of these codes – codes of conduct for example
– are so called because of their codification into tabular form, in which
case the term ‘code’ derives from codex (Latin: tablet, book).

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