Key Terms: preferred reading, negotiated reading, oppositional reading, ideology, reception theory, demographics, psychographics, situated culture, cultural competence.
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist who tries to explain how society interacts and how individuals in society have different interpretations and responses to media texts.
He tried to answer a deceptively simple question; ‘Why do some people accept one media text and reject another? ’
Furthermore, he tried to understand the ideological underpinning of media texts & media audiences and he moved media theory away from a model, which assumed that the audience was a ‘mass audience’ which responded en-masse and interpreted a text in the same way.
His ideas are part of ‘Reception Theory’.
Reception theory states that the way in which an audience has individual interpretation of a media text and that reading is a two stage process.
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Ideology and Meaning The producer encodes ideology into a text and wishes it to be read in a particular way.
- The audience then decodes the text, but they also bring their own ideology to the text.
A ‘preferred reading’ is made where ideologies meet and the audience broadly interpret the media text in the way it was intended by the producer.
Hall suggested that media texts could be read in three possible ways:
- Preferred or dominant reading
- Negotiated reading
- Oppositional or aberrant reading
Hall suggests that there are a range of factors which cause an audience to read media differently, he explained by saying there are four areas which have an impact:
- Demographics (Who you are)
- Psychographics (Your values, attitudes and beliefs)
- Situated Culture (How & where you consume the text)
- Cultural Competence (Your existing cultural understanding and experiences)
So What?
Hall is describe a complex and nuanced relationship between the audience and producer, via the media text. He rejects earlier media effects theories, which suggested the audience are passive recipients of messages from the media and have little control or autonomy and accept media messages as, ‘the truth,’ without questioning. Any audience research assumes Hall is right and that producers should make media to cater for a specific audience, with specific values, attitudes and beliefs.
Which Exam / Essay Can I use This In?
Glossary of Terms
- Reception theory – Media theories, which try to describe the relationship between media audiences and industries. Also, to what degree does media influence the behaviours and ideology of the individual and society in general.
- Preferred reading – The audience decode the media text and read the language in the text and representations as they were intended by the producers.
- Negotiated reading – The audience decode the media text, but misread or reject elements of the texts and only partially accept the meaning intended by the producers.
- Oppositional reading – The audience reject the ideologies and representations encoded in the media text.
- Ideology – Values, attitudes and beliefs of an individual or group.
- Demographics – Concrete variables which define an audience (age, gender, socio-economic group, location…)
- Psychographics – The ideology of the audience.
- Situated culture – How, when and where an audience member consumes a media texts.
- Cultural competence – The audience’s knowledge of intertextual references.
KEY QUOTES – IN A NUTSHELL
‘the only distortion in it is that the receiver (AUDIENCE) might not be up to the business of getting the message he or she ought to get’