Audiences: Reception Theory - Stuart Hall

Question 1

Encoding produces a mediated view of the world

Answer 1

They construct a mediated world view. Journalists do not just report the raw facts; they present a carefully orchestrated version of those events

Question 2

Production factors that channel media encoding

Answer 2

• Routines of production: the 24-hour news cycle prompts newspapers to favour breaking news at the expense of older stories. Process govern meaning
• Genre-driven mediation: Genre driven rules often frame the visual or narrative structures of media products. In news reportage, for example, stories are often constructed in a highly formulaic way

Question 3

What causes media misreadings

Answer 3

• Overly complex narratives
• Ideas are too alien
• Language elements can’t be decoded

Question 4

Institutional context

Answer 4

Media process might deliberately choose to employ people who share the same political bias

E.g. predictions regarding audience taste; encoding products in the way they think will appeal to a mass audience

Question 5

Cultural resistance

Answer 5

Media producers might encode messages that reinforce dominant ideologies,m but it is not necessarily true that all audience members will submit to those ideas in a passive or submissive manner.

On the contrary, hall suggests that audiences engage in a continuous assessment of the media they consume

Question 6

Decoding

Answer 6

Media audiences read the messages that producers construct

Question 7

Dominant readings

Answer 7

Occur when audiences knowingly decode texts in the way they were intended by media makers. Audiences agree with any hegemonic encodings

Question 8

Encoding

Answer 8

Media institutions encode media products - using honed processes and strategies to produce media products that communicate messages to their audiences

Question 9

Hegemony

Answer 9

The set of ideas that dominate within society - these ideas are usually formed by those groups who have power.

Hegemonies often legitimise the power of elite social groups. The media plays a key role in distributing hegemonic messages to all sections of society

Question 10

Misreading

Answer 10

An audience reading that fails to correctly decode the intended meaning of a media products as a result of its complexity or illegibility

Question 11

Negotiated readings

Answer 11

Negotiated readings occur when audiences both resist and accept the messages constructed by a media product

Question 12

Oppositional readings

Answer 12

Occur when audiences their individual knowledge, beliefs or experiences to construct a contrary reading of a media text

Question 13

Situated logics

Answer 13

Refers to kinds of experience, knowledge and beliefs that an individual audience members has when decoding a product.

This might also refer to the physical environment in which decoding occurs