This document discusses several theories of how audiences interpret meaning from media texts: Roland Barthes' theory notes that the interpretation can vary depending on an audience's experience. It also discusses denotation (the literal object) and connotation (the cultural meanings associated). Stuart Hall's theory states that audiences can decode texts by fully accepting, partially accepting, or opposing the preferred meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure's signifier-signified theory suggests that signs only make sense when linked to their concepts or meanings.

1. Media Language

2. Roland Barthes
• This theory looks at how an audience will interpret meaning
from a particular media text.
• The interpretation can however can vary depending on the
audiences own personal experience.
• Denotation: is an object placed within media texts.
• It is then dependant on the audience to draw their own
cultural, historical and social knowledge to interpret its
connotations.
• For example: A poppy is just a flower, or, is it something that is
associated with war, violence and death?
• So the basic idea of denotation and connotation is what we
see in a text and then what ideas that we associate with the
image during or after reading the text.

3. Ferdinand De Saussere -
Signifierandsignifiedtheory
• This theory suggests how there can be two levels or meaning
in an object or in a media text.
• There is first the signifier – this is what we can see and the
form the sign takes.
• Then there is signified – which is the that we associate with
the signifier, the concept that it represents.
• So the sign or symbol that we see does not make sense
without the actual object and the meaning it creates.

4. Stuart Hall
• Hall says there are three ways the audience decode texts:
• 1- the audience fully accepts the preferred meaning,
illustrating they agree with the dominant values.
• 2- The audience take a negotiated position, meaning they only
agree with some of the proffered meanings but not all of
them.
• 3- The audience takes an oppositional position, where they
understand the preferred meaning but decide to make their
own interpretation.