Encoding/Decoding: Hall

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

Stuart Hall was a cultural theorist, who looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media. He thought of 3 ways in which people read a media text.


(1) Dominant Reading: the reader perceives the media text in the intended way set by the producers.

(2) Negotiated Reading: the reader partially perceives the media text in the intended way set by the producers, however, changes it to suit their own personality.

(3) Oppositional Reading: the reader has read a text in a way that was not intended by the producers, due to their social position.

Hall believed that media power creates dominant ideology and that mass media defines important issues through audience positioning.

Polysemy: how a text can have multiple meanings and how different individuals interpret and decode the same text differently based on their culture.

When I come to creating my OTS, I will consider audiences using Hall's reception theory. As I am creating a thriller OTS, I think that I want the audience to think for themselves and figure out the enigma so I will consider negotiated reading as this will add suspense.