Mar 25, 2010 an active audience theory is developed by stuart hall, and it is used to examine the relationship between a media text and its audiences. The mcdonalds advert on the right is a perfect example of reception theory. Stuart halls audience reception theory 2 posted by n ford at 12. Stuart halls encoding decoding model of communication. Hall proposed a new model of mass communication which highlighted the importance of active interpretation within relevant codes. Reception analysis takes a closer look at what is actually going on when an audience encounters a media text. In the past time, most theorists about the interpretation of mass media messages simply treat audiences as passive sponges, who just absorb the content of television and other media.
Encoding decoding by stuart hall free download as powerpoint presentation. The stuart hall theory 1980 is a active audience theory which sees the audience as being actively engaged in the interpretation of media texts, rather than passive consumers people that readwatchlisten to something and just let it wash over them and dont follow up or create discussion on what they have seen. Jul 17, 2017 a masterful orator, hall energized the audience in illinois, a group of thinkers and writers from around the world who had gathered for a summer institute devoted to parsing marxist approaches to. Three approaches to media reception and audience reception. In contrast to theories that understand the audience as passive, simply absorbing the meanings and messages embedded in a text, reception theorists argue that meaning emerges processually in the interaction between the text and the socially situated audience. A masterful orator, hall energized the audience in illinois, a group of thinkers and writers from around the world who had gathered for a summer institute devoted to parsing marxist approaches to. To what extent are genres culturally bound versus universal. Home a level and ib study tools media studies audience theory. Pdf audience reception analysis of moroccan public service. Media studies audience reception theory mnemonic teaching. People who make media products put ideas in their texts which they expect audiences to understand. Jan 30, 2017 reception studies audience centered theory that focuses on how various types of audience members make sense of specific forms of content sometimes referred to as reception analysis polysemic the characteristic of media texts as fundamentally ambiguous and legitimately interpretable in different ways. A quick introduction to stuart hall s audience theory of encodingdecoding. These meanings can be dominant, negotiated or oppositional.
Newspaper front pages are used to define the theory, so this would be particularly useful for the wjec media gcse exam. In literature, it originated from the work of hansrobert jauss in the late 1960s. Reception theory was at its most influential during the 1970s and early 1980s in germany and usa fortier. Transnational audience reception as a theater of struggle. Stuart halls reception theory explained media studies. The cultural theorist, stuart hall, explored how people make sense of media texts. The theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer meaning that. His approach, called the encodingdecoding model of communication, is a form of textual analysis that focuses on the scope of negotiation and opposition by the audience.
Also known as reception analysis, audience reception theory has come to be widely used as a. Stuart mcphail hall fba 3 february 1932 10 february 2014 was a jamaicanborn british marxist sociologist, cultural theorist and political activist. The cultural theorist stuart hall was one of the main proponents of reception theory, first developed in his 1973 essay encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Audience reception research now comprises a substantial, but increasingly disunified, field of investigation. Production, circulation, use consumption and reproduction. Audience can choose to read the text any way they please, most of the time not the way the producer intended. Dec 09, 2008 reception theory was at its most influential during the 1970s and early 1980s in germany and usa fortier, 2002. Stuart hall developed reception theory, popularly known as audience theory or readers reception theory, in 1973.
Using the important contribution of stuart hall s encoding decoding model as a starting point, i advocate a perspective in which audience reception is seen as structured by textual as well as by psychosocial factors. In american pop culture to represent means to carry the name of a certain area or group. Encoding decoding by stuart hall ideologies hegemony. Some early thoughts reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the readers reception of a literary text. What is stuart halls reception theory in regards to. British cultural studies suggests three frameworks for reading texts, based on the work of theorist stuart hall. It is more generally called audience reception in the analysis of communications models.
Jun 05, 2015 stuart hall s preferred reading theory stuart hall proposed the idea that as an audience we must decode messages that the media have encoded us to hear and see. Much of the research to date has been concerned with three central foci. However, different audience members will decode the media in different ways and possibly not in the way the producer originally intended. Is halls encoding decoding model still useful media essay. Using the important contribution of stuart halls encoding decoding model as a starting point, i advocate a perspective in which audience reception is seen as structured by. Preferred reading, oppositional reading or negotiated reading. Base and superstructure in marxist cultural theory 15 raymond williams 3. But stuart hall brought to notice the active role of audience by focusing upon the complex process of encoding and decoding. Stuart hall states that as the audience of a given piece of media text, there are 3 different ways to interpret said text. Sage books the ultimate social sciences digital library. Hall believes mass media maintain the dominance of those alrea hall believed that the great powers in the us dominant main jamaican born, lived and worked in the uk 1951.
Reception studies audience centered theory that focuses on how various types of audience members make sense of specific forms of content sometimes referred to as reception analysis. Cultural theorist stuart hall breaks down and interrogates the role of representation in images, and discusses cultures central role in representation. Stuart halls encodingdecoding model of communication essentially states that meaning is encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver and that. A short presentation on stuart halls encodingdecoding theory a short presentation on althusserian theory and neogramscian cultural studies. Fourstage communication model in his essay hall proposed four stage theory of communication in which he identified the following stages. Hall, along with richard hoggart and raymond williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as british cultural studies or the birmingham school of cultural studies. Dec 15, 2017 this lesson explores the fundamentals of stuart hall s reception theory, as covered in the eduqas alevel specification. Stuart halls audience positioning theory by thamer.
Audience response theory audience appeal gcse media. His essay encoding and decoding television discourse focuses on the encoding and decoding of the content given to the audience no matter the form of media such as magazinespapers, televisionradios, games. Durham and kellner explain that the encodingdecoding theory ventures from previous theories that operated on a much linear framework. The audience agree with the messages and ideology that the producer has. Social aspects also affect how the audience decodes the media. Reception analysis is an active audience theory that looks at how audiences interact with a media text taking into account their situated culture this is their daily life.
Stuart halls contribution to critical theory and to the study of politics, culture, media, race, diaspora and postcolonialism has been fundamental, hence his thought is difficult to summarise. The cultural effects model recognises that the media audience is made up of people from a variety of social backgrounds. Stuart hall s encodingdecoding theory suggests that audience derive their own meaning from media texts. Jun 15, 2017 this work was based on stuart halls encodingdecoding model of the relationship between text and audience the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded by the reader, and there may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. Stuart hall states that audience members adopt one of the following three positions when they decode the text.
David morley is a sociologist who studies the sociology of the television audience. Mainly anchored on gramscis concept of hegemony and stuart hall s encodingdecoding theory, the researcher conducted a reception analysis through a textual. Stuart halls preferred reading theory danielle white a2. Preferred or dominant reading in reception studies the producerintended meaning of a. A basic outline of stuart hall s reception audience theory for use with eduqas exam board. Cultural theory genealogies, orientations and territories david oswell xxi volume i. It provides an analysis of how audiences perceive a certain media message, what meanings do they drive, how do they associate to it, what events of their and others life do they relate to it, how do the message fulfill their needs and satisfaction and. Cq press your definitive resource for politics, policy and people. Apr 03, 2019 in this video i explain stuart halls reception theory with examples. Similarly, readerresponse criticism also refers to a general shift in attention from the. School notion of a passive audience in their conceptions of an active audience. Encoding and decoding in the television discourse was written by stuart hall in 1974, which was critically acclaimed in mass communications research and paved the way for many academics to build upon the theoretical model of encoding and decoding between audience and receiver. Hall suggests, meaning is given to images that are depicted, and as a use of worldwide communication can change the way people, places and events are presented. Three approaches to media reception and audience reception studies.
Audience reception theory hegemony hegemony according to hall, describes the subtle sway of societys haves over its have nots. Audience reception theory can be traced back to work done by british sociologist stuart hall and his communication model first revealed in an essay titled encodingdecoding. Stuart hall s encoding decoding model of communication is a theory of communication that suggests how audiences derive meaning from media texts artifacts. This process is produced through the articulation of distinctive moments. Stuart hall has 98 books on goodreads with 10955 ratings.
As a result, he developed the communication model of encoding and decoding. In line with the organic intellectual of gramsci, for whom knowledge has to be shared beyond the realm of the intellectual, his epistemological. Halls ideas about mass media and domin jamaican born, lived and worked in the uk 1951. The study applies stuart halls encodingdecoding theory to examine the interactions of the moroccan audience with the content of the two. This theory was put forward by professor stuart hall in the television discourse encodingdecoding in 1974, with later research by david morley and. Encodingdecoding model as discussed we generally dont sit in front of the tv, play video games, watch movies and then copy exactly what weve seen we wont let us lower our moral standards and we may not even let it contribute to our outlook of the world at all. The work of representation stuart hall 1 representation, meaning and language in this chapter we will be concentrating on one of the key processes in the cultural circuit see du gay et al. A thoughtful synthesis of emerging ideas in audience research in the heyday of research on the mass audience for television.
The cultural theorist stuart ha ll was one of the main proponents of reception t heory, first developed in his 1973 essay encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Sage video bringing teaching, learning and research to life. Stuart hall and the rise of cultural studies the new yorker. So, producers try to fix a meaning or way of understanding people or events in their texts. Hall was concerned by just how powerful the media is and believed that the media can effectively dictate what should be issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning. During its heroic period in the 1960s and 1970s, the centre developed a variety. Stuart hall was a proponent of the reception theory davis, 2004 and his ideas were an improvement of the original theory. Includes quotations from hall himself, definitions of key terms and engaging tasks on the encodingdecoding model and applying reception theory to historical vs. Reception theory emphasizes the active role played by the spectator in constructing and interpreting the meaning of a text. Apr 20, 2014 this is the fourth in the series of audience theory this looks at stuart halls reception theory.
The application of stuart halls audience reception theory to. Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in gods name is the point of cultural studiesat that point, i think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little weve been able to change anything or get anybody to do. Producers generally encode a specific message or meaning within their product and then the audience decodes it in 1 of 3 ways. Reception theory as developed by stuart hall asserts that media texts are encoded and decoded. Sage business cases real world cases at your fingertips. Audiences and interpretations1 lse research online. By treating breaking bad as a cultural artifact moving across what hall defines. These are some of the questions that come to mind when considering the. Hall identified a complex structure involved in message production and its reception. The producer encodes messages and values into their media which are then decoded by the audience. Stuart hall 4 has a different meaning than its an approach to understanding critical theorythe words are basically the same, but the different order creates a different meaning.
Hall s model of communication moved away from the view that the media had the. Sage reference the complete guide for your research journey. Polysemic the characteristic of media texts as fundamentally ambiguous and legitimately interpretable in different ways. The theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer meaning that whoever produces the text fills the product with values and messages. Stuart halls encodingdecoding theory suggests that audience derive their own meaning from media texts. Stuart hall encoding and decoding stuart hall is a cultural theoristnand a professor of sociology. This study examines the theater of struggle in young filipino womens reception of korean television dramas in view of the american cultural imperialism that is deeply entrenched in the philippine society. A critical introduction 1984, reception theory refers throughout to a general shift in concern from the author and the work to the text and the reader.
Stuart hall representation and the media christina. Hebdige believed that punk was incorporated into the media in an attempt to categorize it within society, and he critically examines this issue by applying halls theory of encoding and decoding. Hall argued that any piece of information can be encoded in multiple ways, and every message has more than one meaning. Mainly anchored on gramscis concept of hegemony and stuart hall s encodingdecoding theory, the researcher conducted a reception analysis through.
Stuart hall representation and the media christina pataialii. How does stuart halls encodingdecoding model and his discussion of cultural codes inform our understanding of genre. An introduction to stuart hall s audience reception theory, with a very memorable if a little rude we use the word shart. Stuart hall s theory involves the true meaning and media representation with a gap in the middle to ensure that the image depicted will evoke reaction from the audience. Stuart halls theoretical framework of encodingdecoding provides a broader spectrum for analysing the interpretation of a mass media message amongst its audience. Another semeiologist, roland barthes, explains that cultural signs, symbols, and images can have both denotative and connotative functions. Stuart hall arguing that researchers should direct their attention toward 1 analysis of the social and political context in which content is produced encoding, and.
All of this forms the core of stuart hall s encodingdecoding model. Roger silverstone centers on audience reception and audience ethnography as partial solutions to some key theoretical problemswith identifying the meaning of a text, with the concept of ideology, and with the difficulty of. Stuart hall reception audience theory media teaching. The first addresses the link between audience reception and social and demographic group memberships, drawing from the seminal work of stuart hall in. He looks at the issue within the most commonly used definition of representation, meaning to. The spectacle of the other stuart hall contents 1 introduction 225 1. Audiences and reception theory by julie martin stuart halls. In other words, meaning is created because watching or reading and processing media text. Richard hoggart, the uses of literacy and the cultural turn 3 stuart hall 2. Audiences and reception theory by julie martin stuart hall s encodingdecoding model of communication essentially states that meaning is encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver and that these encoded meanings may be decoded to mean something else. Clearly, what we have labelled in the diagram below meaning structures 1. The traditional communication theory took the audience for granted.
In the explicitly marxist british tradition, which developed from the 1960s onward, theorists, most notably stuart hall, view cultural texts as sites. Pdf understanding stuart halls encodingdecoding model. A brief note by nasrullah mambrol on november 2, 2016 0. May 03, 2017 stuart hall was a proponent of the reception theory davis, 2004 and his ideas were an improvement of the original theory. Conceptualized by hans robert jauss in his toward an aesthetic of reception in the late 1960s, reception theory refers to a historical application of the reader response theory, emphasizing altering interpretive and. Reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the readers reception of a literary text. Theory looks at how people use the media to gratify a range of needs including the need for information, personal identity, integration, social interaction and entertainment. Sep 14, 2017 cultural theorist stuart hall breaks down and interrogates the role of representation in images, and discusses cultures central role in representation. Reception studies and classicalfilm theory reception theory. Note that hall has two theories which are to be understood and applied in this specification. The application of stuart halls audience reception theory.
He investigated the role of audience positioning in the interpretation mass media texts by social groups. Hall suggests a fourstage theory of communication fig. In literary studies, reception theory originated from the work of hansrobert jauss in the late 1960s. His approach, called the encodingdecoding model of communication, is a form of textual analysis that focuses on the scope of negotiation and opposition by the au dience. Stuart hall s representation theory please do not confuse with reception is that there is not a true representation of people or events in a text, but there are lots of ways these can be represented. For example, people can represent their neighborhood, sports team, or music group by shouting out, or wearing the right colors, teeshirts, stickers, and so on.