Stuart Hall was a cultural theorist who developed a model of encoding and decoding to understand how different social groups interpret mass media texts. The model suggests there are three ways of reading a text: a dominant reading where the reader accepts the intended meaning, a negotiated reading where the reader partly accepts and modifies the meaning, and an oppositional reading where the reader rejects the intended meaning based on their social position. Hall was interested in how the media propagates ideologies and positions audiences to frame debates on social issues.

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Stuart Hall – Encoding/Decoding
 Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist and Professor of
Sociology at the Open University.
 Stuart Hall looked at the role of audience positioning
in the interpretation of mass media texts by different
social groups. Hall came up with a model suggesting
three ways in which we may read a media text:

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Encoding and decoding
 Dominant reading- reader fully accepts the
preferred reading (audience will read the text the
way the author intended them to) so that the code
seems natural and transparent.
 The negotiated reading – the reader partly believes
the code and broadly accepts the preferred reading,
but sometimes modifies it in a way which reflects
their own position, experiences and interests.
 The oppositional reading – the readers social
position places them in an oppositional relation to
the dominant code. They reject the reading.

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Media Power
 Hall was concerned with media power, including how it
propagates particular social values, to create dominant
ideologies (in other words framing public debate surrounding
certain issues; e.g. the role of women in society, asylum and
immigration, the welfare system, the monarchy etc...)
 He believes that the mass media create and define issues of
public concern and interest through audience positioning.
 Polysemy- is the capacity for a text to have multiple
meanings. It is to do with how individuals interpret and decode
readings in different contexts and cultures.