Reception Theory suggests that audiences receive and interpret media messages in three ways: the preferred reading, where the audience understands the message as intended by the producer; the oppositional reading, where the audience rejects the producer's message and develops their own interpretation; and the negotiated reading, where the audience both accepts parts of the producer's message but also develops their own interpretation. The theory sees audiences as both active, in that decoding media requires thinking, and passive, in that audiences will initially accept the encoded, or produced, message. A criticism is that the theory assumes audiences are either lazy and passive or intelligent and active decoders.

1. Theory: Reception Theory
Theorists:
What is the theory?
The theory suggests the ways in which we receive and interpret the
information form the media which we consume.
The theory is split up into three sections, which all tell us how the
consumer decodes the information given to them. The first is the
dominant/preferred reading. This is how the producer wants the
audience to receive the message. The audience will be able to follow he
message if it is easy and clear enough to get without help or further
explanation.
The second part is the oppositional reading, where the audience rejects
the preferred reading set out by the producer, and they create their
own meaning for the text. This can happen when narrative themes do
not apply to modern society.
The third part is the negotiated reading, where there is a compromise
between the two. So basically the reading gets part of the producers
vision but comes up with their own meaning too.
Does this theory see the audience as active or passive? Why do you
think this?
The audience for this theory is both active and passive. Or the encoded
media part of the theory, the audience is passive. They take any and all
information given to them and just accept it. The decoding part of it
requires them to think a bit more to get the message that is being told
to them.
What are the criticisms of this theory?
It assumes that the audience is either lazy enough to just accept
anything they are told, or intelligent enough to decode the messages
that they are given. This means that the theory is solely based upon the
intelligence of the consumer.

2. Apply the theory:
An example could be who we see as the villain in stories or in films, for
example, the Joker in The Dark Knight. His hair is greasy, which give
connotations of him being unwashed and filthy, his eyes are black like
that of a skull, which is usually associated with evil. The way he acts is
quite obviously immoral also. So this is an example of the preferred
reading, as it is obvious to the reader that the Joker is a bad guy.