Liaison in Irreciprocal Screen Discourse: Properties of Encoding and Decoding

Abstract

This article discusses one-sided screen discourse and the properties of encoding and decoding in it. The relevance of the research is conditioned by the dominance of artificially created screen information environment in modern communication and its increasing influence on the formation of public opinion, including through the distortion of information. The aim of this article is to describe the communication that takes place in one-way screen discourse in terms of encoding and decoding, as well as to identify the influence of these processes on information exchange. The source of material of the study was the detective series “Voskresensky” (8 episodes, 1 season), a total of 432 min were analysed. Screen discourse, being a part of mass communication, is inextricably linked to the activity and “sociality” of the communicative process. In this regard, this study adopts the activity concept and also implements a special discursive-semiotic approach to the organisation of screen discourse. Interpretation, analysis, synthesis, descriptive method, method of contextual analysis, functional-pragmatic methods were chosen as research methods. In the course of the research the following results were found. Information exchange in screen discourse can be characterised as: free, disequilibrium and mediated. Engineering and constructive activity is its main support. When encoding a screen message, the addresser, using a variety of codes according to his own intention, introduces variants and various possibilities into it, allowing the addressee to make a meaningful choice among them providing freedom of interpretation. The addressee, proceeding from the external expression - the meaningful structures embedded in the screen “speech” - reconstructs the process of creating the screen message, and relying on his knowledge of the “language” of screenness, through this external expression goes outwards to the content and meanings. The dialectical unity of symmetry and asymmetry is one of the main characteristics of information exchange in one-sided screen discourse. Symmetry is responsible for the ease of understanding the broadcast information, while asymmetry is responsible for endless semiosis. This combination makes it voluminous and dynamic.

Keywords

• screen text
• screen discourse
• encoding
• decoding
• discursive semiotics