The Media Reception Theory:
- 1. This theory focuses around the concept that audience members are active. In the 1980’s and 1990’s more research was made focusing on the way individuals received and interpreted texts and how their individual traits like their gender, age, class and ethnicity affected how they consumed media products.
- 2. Stuart Hall: These thoughts from the previous slide were based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience. He believed the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between different readings of the same code. This resulted in him coming up with three reception models which relate to the readings people may have to media products. However, by using recognised codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and therefore creating an of agreement on what the code means.
- 3. Hall’s Reception Models: • The dominant (or 'hegemonic') reading: This is where the viewers fully shares the text's code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading (a reading which may not have been the result of any conscious intention on the part of the author(s). In an occasion like this the code seems “natural.” • Negotiated reading: This is where the viewers partly shares the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests. • Oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') reading: The viewer, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.) (e.g. when watching a television broadcast produced on behalf of a political party they normally vote against).