Stuart Hall Reception Theory

WHAT I CAN APPLY : Apply this theory to my music video on what our dominant audience will think and whether the message will come accross. 

StuartMcPhail Hall, was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. 

He developed the reception theory, which focuses on audience and the way they actively engage with the interpretation of media texts. The idea of his theory is that individuals interpret textst in different ways and it demonstrates that despite the fact that one message is sent out, that some might understand the message differently. 

Stuart Hall claimed that media texts go through certain stages of decoding and encoding. The theory states that media texts are encoded by the producer and that they contain the ideas of the people who created the media text. Hence, the media texts might be understood differently by every audience. This is known as decoding. An example of this could be the music video of Miley Cyrus for her song We Can't Stop and her other music video for Wrecking Ball.





In these particular music videos, the intention of the producer and Cyrus was to make her audience forget about her typical Hannah Montana image, which she had gotten after playing the lead character for years. However, instead of seeing her as a new and interesting Miley Cyrus, the audience reaction was that she was considered "slutty" and "disgraceful". This again, might not be every audience views on the video. 

Stuart Hall included 3 different types of audiences decoding of a media text:

1. Dominant/Preferred - How the producer wants the audience to view the media text and that they get the preferred message that is conveyed.
2. Negotiated - A compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings, meaning that the audience understands the text but disagrees with areas in the text that they have their own views on.
3. Oppositional - This is where the audience rejects the encoded meaning and creates their own meaning for the text, they completely disagree with the message that is being submitted by the text.