1. Stuart Hall
Audience Positioning
Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist which shows he should have some ideas on audiences
when it comes to media and how texts are sent for the audience to perceive.
He looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts
by different social groups. Hall built a model suggesting three ways in which the
audience may perceive a media production:
Dominant Reading: The audience will read into the text or receive a message from a
video exactly how the author or artist wanted them to, so the events seem natural and
in order.
The Negotiated Reading: The reader believes the text or products conventions and
message/narrative to some degree but sometimes modify certain aspects as to allow
them to reflect and compare it to their own situation.
The Oppositional Reading: The position of the reader or audience places them
perceiving the narrative in opposition to the dominant code and makes them reject the
reading or narrative.
Hall was concerned with the power of media, with aspects of how it propagates
particular social values, to create dominant ideologies (how it represents certain
things and makes the audience think of them in that certain way).
He believes that the media masses create and define certain issues of public concern
and interest with the theory of audience positioning and how they portray their
message and what target audience they send it out to.
Polysemy - is the capacity for a text or narrative to have multiple meanings, it is to do
with how individuals interpret and decode the messages in different contexts for
reasons such as culture, age, upbringing and so forth.
