Stuart Hall

After seeing Matty's earlier post about theorists I remembered my teacher (Mr Wroe) mentioning Stuart Hall in one of our previous lessons. I looked up his work and found that he was one of the main theorists to come up with the idea of "reception theory".

His Reception Theory is about how different readers interpret texts in different ways due to their cultural backgrounds and life experiences.

Hall also developed his own theory ("Hall's Theory") of encoding and decoding. This stated that audiences have 3 different reactions to a media text

1)Dominant/Preferred Reading - How the director/creator wants the audience to view the media text

2)Opposition Reading - When the audience rejects the preferred reading and creates their own reading of the text

3)Negotiated Reading - A compromise between the dominant and the opposition readings, where the audience accepts the directors views but has their own views aswell

We cannot incorporate this theory into the building of our teaser, though we can analyse our text afterwards and see how people react to it.

PG