Encoding/decoding model of communication

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The encoding/decoding model of communication emerged in rough and general form in 1948 in Claude E. Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," where it was part of a technical schema for designating the technological encoding of signals. Gradually, it was adapted by communications scholars, most notably Wilbur Schramm, in the 1950s, primarily to explain how mass communications could be effectively transmitted to a public, its meanings intact by the audience (i.e., decoders). As the jargon of Shannon's information theory moved into semiotics, notably through the work of thinkers Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Umberto Eco, who in the course of the 1960s began to put more emphasis on the social and political aspects of encoding. It became much more widely known, and popularised, when adapted by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in 1973, for a conference addressing mass communications scholars. In a Marxist twist on this model, Stuart Hall's study, titled "Encoding and Decoding...

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