Encoding and Decoding

As a communication's student at SJSU, I took a class about media critisim.  One of the things I learned, that I thought I would relay to you, how the advertisers encode their own meaning into their ads and we decode the meaning of the images we see in ads.  I wanted you guys to know these terms so that you guys can properly evaluate the meaning of the ad and not become a victim to those tricky advertisement techniques. 

Encoding is the meaning the advertiser created
Decoding is how we as viewers, interpret meaning from what we see in the ads. 

There are three types of ways we decode:

Dominant- we recieve the message of the picture or text in an ad in an "unquestioning manner"

Negotiated reading- we can interpet the dominant meaning of the ad from the image

Oppositional reading- when the viewer completely disagrees with the ideological position within an image or they can reject or ignore it all together.