This document provides an overview of reception theory, which emphasizes how audiences receive and interpret media texts. It explains that producers encode texts with intended meanings or messages, but audiences can decode them in different ways - either correctly understanding the message, rejecting it, or misunderstanding it. The document outlines Stuart Hall's three types of audience decoding: dominant/preferred, where the audience agrees with the producer's message; negotiated, where the audience selectively accepts or refines the message; and oppositional, where the audience recognizes but rejects the dominant meaning. Examples are given of each type of decoding for a hypothetical media production on cyberbullying.

1. Reception Theory
Tom and Lilly

2. What is the reception theory?
• Reception theory is a version of reader
response literary theory that emphasizes the
reader's reception of a literary text.

3. The Reception theory suggests:
• - When a producer constructs a text it is
encoded with a meaning or message that the
producer wishes to convey to the audience.
• In some instances audiences will correctly
decode the message or meaning and
understand what the producer was trying to
say.
• In other cases the audiences will either reject
or fail to correctly understand the message.

4. Stuart Hall
• Stuart Hall identified three types of audience
readings (or decoding) of the text.
• DOMINANT OR PREFERRED
• NEGOTIATED
• OPPOSITIONAL

5. DOMINANT
• Where the audience decodes the message as
the producer wants them to do and broadly
agrees with it.
• Our Dominant reading within our production
is, “Cyber-bullying happens when you use
social networking sites” We will prove this
through examples and showing the dangers of
online sites.

6. NEGOTIATED
• Where the audience accepts, rejects or refines
elements of the text in the light of previously
held views.
• Our negotiated reading is where the audience
still uses social networking sites, but are more
careful with what they post online and are
more aware of the dangers online.

7. OPPOSITIONAL
• Where the dominant meaning is recognised
but rejected for cultural, political or
ideological reasons.
• Our oppositional reading is where members of
our audience will argue with are dominant
reading as they use social networking sites
and haven’t been cyber-bullied and therefor
believe are reading is far from the real.

9. 1. The consumption of media texts has an
EFFECT or INFLUENCE upon the audience.
2. Audiences are PASSIVE and powerless to
prevent the influence.
3. The power lies with the MESSAGE of the text.