Encoding and decoding in the television discourse

Two themes have been cited for this Colloquy: the highly focussed theme concerning the nature of the ‘televisual language’, and the very general and diffused concern with ‘cultural policies and programmes’. At first sight, these concerns seem to lead in opposite directions: the first towards formal, the second towards societal and policy questions. My aim, however, is to try to hold both concerns within a single framework. My purpose is to suggest that, in the analysis of culture, the inter-connection between societal structures and processes and formal or symbolic structures is absolutely pivotal. I propose to organize my reflections around the question of the encoding/decoding moments in the communicative…