The Way Of Decoding By Audience

The TV news, including , is becoming the essential ideology instrument in the modern society considering that TV news is not only delivering information, but also propagating ideas and trying to influence the audience. In the visual angles of the theories which regard the propagators as the center, the function of the ideology was recognized tacitly. People believe in that when in the process of watching TV news, the audiences have been influenced and controlled by the text of the TV news. What is more, the audiences will accept the ideology as soon as they are inlayed in the news report.As a correction of the one-way visual angle, Hall Stuart regards the TV text as a public platform for different meanings, and the meanings of the text are built by the propagator' encoding and the audience' decoding in his theory of "encoding/decoding". In the stage of encoding, propagators always try to control audiences by inlaying some prevalence meanings in the TV text. But when the audiences decode the text, they can take part in the producing of the meaning of the text, through reading the text by their ways from their social-culture frameworks, individual disparities and different circumstances of watching. Hall even brings up a hypothesis that the decoding ways of audience are counterparting with their positions and standpoints in the social framework, the upper level of the society is dominant-hegemonic reading, the middle-level of the society is negotiated reading, and the bottom layer is oppositional reading. Hall's theory provides a possibility of fighting for the meanings with propagators, re-establishes the audience's body position, and provides a new visual angle for us to understand the audiences.This research is just an inspection of this classic theory in Chinese context. The researcher will picture the different prospects on the audiences' reading , and inspect the relationship of the audiences' reading ways and their hierarchical positions through the experiential research of the watching experiences and reading meanings of the audiences in different hierarchies of Chengdu city.This research will divide into two parts. Firstly, I will analyze the encoding of the text of and find the construct frame, the way of organizing the contents and inlaying the ideology in the means of content analysis method and the discourse analysis method. Secondly, I will analyze the audiences' decoding. According to the criterion of social hierarchy classification from Chinese social academy of science's and the requistion and agenda of the Qualitative Reseach approach, this paper extract ten audience samples from different social hierarchies in Chengdu citizen who have the habit of watching . I have depth communications with them, collect their experience datum of decoding , and thenanalyze the datum with the discourse analysis method. I have mainly seized their decoding from three levels that the audiences'cognitions of the whole frame of the text, the audiences'comprehension ways of the contents of the text, and the audiences'decoding ways of the ideology of the text.The research finds that there is so much active and diverse meaningful decoding in audiences'wathing practice, including three reading ways, that is, odominant-hegemonic reading, negotiated reading and oppositional reading, which has been refered by Hall. However, the three decoding ways are not counterparting with the audiences' positions and standpoints in the social framework. It has been found by the research that the reason is that in the special Chinese context, all the hierarchy's audiences depend on the country policies promulgate center------in the different degree to provide guidance for their social activities, which has reduced the hierarchy handicap on the audiences'decoding. Moreover, the research hs also found that there are two factors relevant to the audiences'decoding, one is the degree of the audience's dependence on , the other is the diverse degree of the audience's other media contact. This paper has built the mode of the influence factors of audiences' decoding way, and illustratesd it.