A message must be meaningfully decoded before it can produce any effect.

Evidence

At a certain point, however, the broadcasting structures must yield an encoded message in the form of a meaningful discourse. The institution-societal relations of production must pass into and through the modes of a language for its product to be “realized.” This initiates a further differentiated moment, in which the formal rules of discourse and language operate. Before this message can have an “effect” (however defined), or satisfy a “need” or be put to a “use,” it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully decoded. It is this set of decoded meanings which “have an effect,” influence, entertain, instruct, or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological, or behavioral consequences. In a determinate moment, the structure employs a code and yields a “message”: at another determinate moment, the “message,” via its decodings, issues into a structure. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 786

Categorization

• XREF: This is the premise of Hall’s encoding/decoding essay — the decoded meaning, not the transmitted content, is what acts on the audience. Connects to reception theory’s break with transmission models of communication.
• SEED: An essay angle: how this decoded-message-first principle prefigures modern debates over media effects and algorithmic content — meaning-making precedes influence.