Media Reception theory

Media Reception theory

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  The Reception Theory By Prada Nayar
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  Stuart Hall •Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-Born cultural theorist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom. • Stuart Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was a founding figure of the The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. • He was also President of the British Sociological Association from 1995 to 1997. • Hall was one of the main proponents of Reception Theory and developed Hall's Theory of encoding and decoding.
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  Audience Over thecourse of the past century or so, media analysts have developed several effects models, such as theoretical explanations of how humans take in the information that is given by media texts and how this might effect their behavior. Effects theory remains a very widely debated area of Media and Psychology research, as no one is able to come up with definite evidence that audiences will always react to media texts one way or another. The scientific debate is clouded by the politics of the situation: some audience theories are seen as a call for more censorship, others for less control.
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  Reception Theory Thisapproach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text—social control. The concept of an active audience, in the 1980s and 1990s a lot of work was done on the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual circumstances (gender, class, age, ethnicity) or experiences affected their reading. This was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model, which regards the relationship between text and audience. The media text is encoded by the producer, and further decoded by the reader. There may be major differences between two different readings of the same code. However, by using recognisable codes and conventions, and by drawing upon audience expectations relating to aspects such as genre and use of stars, the producers can position the audience and therefore create a certain extent of agreement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.
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  In a modelderiving from Frank Parkin's 'meaning systems', Hall suggested three hypothetical interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text.  Dominant reading: The reader fully shares the text's code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading.  Negotiated reading: The reader partly shares the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and.  Oppositional reading: The reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, and understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame.
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  Uses & Gratifications • The basic theme of Uses and Gratifications is the idea that people use the media to get specific gratifications. • This is in opposition to the Hypodermic Needle model that claims consumers have no say in how the media influences them. • The main idea of the Uses and Gratifications model is that people are not helpless victims of all powerful media, but use media to fulfil their various needs. • These needs serve as motivations for using media.
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  Uses & Gratifications Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz devised the uses and gratifications model in 1974 to highlight five areas of gratification in media texts for audiences. These include: o Escape: Some media texts allow the user to escape from reality. For example, video games. o Social interaction: People create personal relationships with the characters in a media text. Potentially this could become dangerous if people do not question the reality of such texts. It also creates a common ground for conversation in people's every day lives. o Identify — People often identify a part of themselves in a media text, either through character or circumstance. For example, hair style trends stemming from a magazine feature. This can go a long way in people's ideologies. o Inform and educate — the audience gain an understanding of the world around them by consuming a media text, for example print and broadcast news. o Entertain - consumed purely for entertainment purposes, meaning that text need not have any other gratifications.
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  Thorpe Park Advertisement Various Readings o Under 16 years: This advert would appeal to this particular age category as it promotes an extremely popular theme park. Furthermore, the variety of rides that are presented in the advert would entice a young audience as it is considered thrilling and exciting experience. This would therefore make it a dominant reading as the audience fully shares the text's code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading as was intended by the producers. o Over 40 years: This age range are typically viewed as parents with elder children, therefore this advert would not particularly appeal to them as they would deem it beyond their age and therefore have no impact on them. This would have an oppositional reading as the reader’s social situation, in the case their age, places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code. They understand the preferred reading but rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame. o Non-White: This circumstance would not directly impact the way this text is perceived as mainly age would affect their perception, so this could be either types of reading depending on circumstances other than their ethnicity.