Hall and Morley's work aimed to move past notions of passive media audiences. They argued that audiences make sense of media texts based on their own interpretive frameworks, drawing from their cultural experiences with factors like gender, class, ethnicity, and politics. Audiences can have dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings of media that respectively align with, partially align with, or oppose the preferred meaning embedded in a text. Their approach acknowledges that different audience members can have varied responses to the same media messages based on their cultural backgrounds.