Stuart Hall argued that audiences can have dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings of media texts based on their cultural identity and ideology. David Morley conducted research using Hall's theories, including a famous study of audience reactions to the BBC program Nationwide. The study found different responses based on participants' backgrounds, supporting Hall's ideas about encoded and decoded meanings.

1. K AT I E H A L F YA R D
AUDIENCE THEORY

2. STUART HALL
Hall argued that there are differences in cultural identity and ideology and
outlined three hypothetical positions which the viewer of a programme
might occupy to show these differences:
• The dominant/hegemonic reading – the reader shares the programme’s
‘code’ (its meanings, values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions) and fully
accepts the ‘preferred reading’ of the programme (a reading which may
not be the result of a conscious intention of the programme makers).
• The negotiated reading – the reader partly shares the programme’s
‘code’ and broadly accepts the ‘preferred reading’, although they modify
it slightly to fit their own interests and position.
• The oppositional/counter-hegemonic reading – the
reader doesn’t share any of the programme’s ‘code’ and
rejects the preferred reading, meaning that they
interpret the signs included in the programme in a
completely different way.

3. RECEPTION THEORY
In the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of research went into the way
individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their
individual circumstances (gender, class, age and ethnicity)
affected their reading of it. This work was based on Stuart Hall’s
encoding/decoding model which stated that the text is encoded
by the producer and decoded by the reader, and there may be
major differences between the readings of the same code by
different people. However, by using recognised codes and
conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations such
as genre, the producers can position the audience and thus
create a certain amount of agreement about what the code
means. This is known as a preferred reading.

4. DAVID MORLEY
David Morley was a media theorist who based his work on Stuart
Hall’s theories. He worked for the Centre of Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) – a research centre in the University of Birmingham,
primarily in the 1970s. He conducted research into the audience’s
reaction to a media text, after Stuart Hall came up with reception
theory, which suggested that different people respond to the same
programme differently.
Morley conducted his research with various participants from
different educational and occupational backgrounds. Different
responses were produced to the same media texts and so he
continued his research to seek whether these findings would
construct dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings- the three
groupings of readings proposed by Stuart Hall (see the previous
slide).

5. THE NATIONWIDE PROJECT
One of Morley’s most famous pieces of research was the
Nationwide Project which he conducted in the late 1970s and early
1980s, alongside Charlotte Brunsdon.
Nationwide was a BBC news and current affairs programme which
ran from the 9th September 1969 to the 5th August 1983. It was
originally broadcast between Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6pm, until
1972 when it was extended to be broadcast each weekday in the
early evening, following the BBC News. It followed a magazine
format, combining political analysis and discussion with customer
affairs. When it was taken off the air in August 1983, it was replaced
by Sixty Minutes.

6. It was CCCS as a group who decided to use Nationwide to study the
encoding/decoding model – a part of reception theory which was
developed by Stuart Hall. It studies an audience’s capability to
decode something which has been encoded into a media text. The
Nationwide study which was based on Hall’s theory was concerned
particularly with “the programme’s distinctive ideological themes
and the particular ways which the audience addressed the viewer”.
Morely conducted qualitative research with various participants
from different educational backgrounds to test Hall’s theories of
different readings, reception and encoding/decoding. He showed
them clips of Nationwide and gauged their reaction, before seeing if
it related to any of Hall’s readings, explained on slide 2.
The first part of this study was published by Morley and Brunsdon in
1978.

7. THE EFFECTS DEBATE
The effects debate is based around the idea that the media
can potentially influence its audience in a negative way. It
states that the public needs to be protected from
inappropriate material via censorship.

8. HYPODERMIC SYRINGE EFFECT
In essence, the hypodermic syringe model is a linear communication
theory which suggests that an audience passively accepts the
message ‘injected’ into them by the mass media, such as through
film. It can be said that like a drug, the message has immediate
effect on the audience, and there is a correlation between the
injection and the reaction. It assumes that we are all the same, and
that we all respond to messages in the same way. We can relate this
to the impact that globalisation has on British cinema because
American culture is injected into the audience when communities in
Britain watch the popular films produced in Hollywood, and the
reaction is that the audience think that American culture is the
correct way of living, and this culture becomes dominant in societies
hundreds of miles away from the USA.

9. TWO STEP FLOW
Two step flow is a model created on the back of the hypodermic syringe
model, as the hypodermic syringe model quickly proved too clumsy for
media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship
between audience and text. It came about in 1940 when Paul
Lazarsfield, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters’
decision making processes during the presidential election campaign
that year. They found from their analysis that information doesn’t flow
directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated – there
are two steps. Firstly, opinion leaders get information from a media
source, and secondly the opinion leaders pass on the information,
along with their interpretation to others, including friends, family and
colleagues.
The opinion leaders were found to pay close attention to the mass
media, to be influential and also similar to those they influence whereas
the ‘influentials’ of the study were not informed by the media and look
up to the opinion leaders.

11. USES AND GRATIFICATION THEORY
As the first generation to grow up with television reached adulthood in the 1960s, it
became increasingly apparent to media theorists that audiences made choices
about what they did when consuming texts. Unlike a passive mass, audiences were
made up of individuals who actively consumed texts for different reasons and in
different ways. In 1984 Lasswell suggested that media texts have the following
functions for individuals and society:
• Surveillance
• Correlation
• Entertainment
• Cultural transmission
• Researchers Bulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in
1974, stating that individuals may choose and use a text for the following
purposes (i.e. uses and gratifications):
• Diversions – escape from every day problems and routine
• Personal relationships – using the media for interaction
• Personal identity – finding yourself reflected in texts, learning behaviour and
values from texts
• Surveillance – information which could be useful for living, e.g. weather reports
and financial news
Since Bulmer and Katz, the theory has had to be updated as new media forms have
come along, such as video games and the Internet.