And What Do The Audience Think?

Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and a professor of Sociology at the Open University. Hall looked into the ways in which audiences read into media texts. This is also called audience positioning. He came up with a model commenting on the three different ways in which we, as an audience, interpret mass media texts by contrasting social groups. 

Encoding and Decoding

The first of the three is:

• Dominant Reading (also known as Preferred Reading): This is where the audience will fully accept and their reactions will match how the producer intended for them to react. This makes the coding seem more organic and natural.

• Oppositional Reading: This is when the audience rejects and doesn't accept the producers intentions. This could be down to their social position. 

• Negotiated Reading: This reading is when the audience is middle grounded on the coding. The audience either partly agrees or disagrees with the intended reaction(s) or modifies it in a way which reflects them more preferably.

Stuart Hall was also interested in the media power; this includes social values and how it creates dominate ideologies. e.g. women's roles in society.  He has a firm belief that mass media holds a key grip on what defines the issues of public concern and catches interest through audience positioning.

Each individual audience member decodes readings uniquely. This brings forms the term polysemy which means a piece of text can have multiple meanings, leaving it open for anyone to interpret however they wish. In various contexts and cultures.