Stuart Hall: Media audience and representation

Reception Theory

• A group of theories have emerged around reception since the 1980s. This focuses on the conditions in which the audience read

Definition

• Encoding - meaning put in e.g. the intended message from the sun newspaper
• Decoding - meaning taken out e.g. audience interpretation
• Polysemy - where there are lots of potential media meanings into the media

3 Types of Reception Theory

• Dominant - audience accepts the producer's intended meaning and agrees with messages
• Negotiated - adds own interpretation
• Oppositional - disagrees with the text's intended ideology

Hall was particularly interested in the representation of 'the other', working class, and women, since the groups are often represented in continuous ways, so this should be contested. He drew heavily on his own experiences as an immigrant in the highly elitist Oxford university.

Stuart Hall on representation

• Re-framing "Britishness"
• Class, religion race in mainstream media "other"
• Immigrant from Jamaica in 1950s. Elitist university - Oxford University
• Popular Culture: soap-operas, magazines, celeb gossip.
• Media for Hall was a way of contesting representations of blade/working class groups