RECEPTION THEORY

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

LESSON 40

RECEPTION THEORY

At the same time that audience-centered theory was attracting the attention of U.S. empirical social

researcher, British cultural studies researchers were developing a different but compatible perspective

on audience activity.

Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary cultural studies headed by Stuart Hall is most

prominent in this regard. Hall argued that the researchers should direct their attention toward:

· Analysis of that social and political context in which content is produced (encoding)

· The consumption of media content

The essence of the reception approach is to locate the attribution and construction of meaning (derived

from media) with the receiver. Media messages are always open and polysemic (having multiple

meanings) and are interpreted according the context and culture of receivers.

Stuart Hall emphasized the stages of transformation through which any media message passes on the

way from its origins to its reception and interpretation. It drew from the basic principles of structuralism

and semiology which presumed that any meaningful message is constructed from sign which can have

denotative and connotative meanings, depending on the choices made by an encoder.

He accepted some of the elements of semiology on these two grounds:

First, communicators choose to encode messages.

For ideological and institutional communicators choose to encode messages for ideological and

institutional purposes and manipulate language and media for those ends (media messages are given a

preferred reading, or what might now be called spin.

Secondly, receivers (decoders) are not obliged to accept messages as sent but can and do resist

ideological influence by applying variant or oppositional readings, according to their own experience

and outlook

In laying out his views about decoding, Hall proposed an approach to audience research that has come

to be known as reception studies or reception analysis.

A central feature of this approach is its focus on how various types of audience members make sense of

the specific forms of content.

Hall drew on Semiotic theory to argue that any media content can be regarded as a text that is made up

of signs , these signs are structured; that is , they are related to one another in specific ways to make

sense of a text- to read a text- you have to be able to interpret the signs and their structure. Example

when you read a sentence you must not only decode the individual words but you also need to interpret

the over-all structure of the sentence to make sense of the sentence as a whole.

Hall argued that most texts can be read in several ways but there is generally a preferred or dominant

reading that the producers of a message intend when they create a message, as a critical theorist, Hall

assumed that most popular media content will have a preferred reading that reinforces the status

quo.

But in addition to this dominant reading, it is possible for audience members to make alternate

interpretations.

They might disagree with or misinterpret some aspects of a message and come up with an alternative or

negotiated meaning that differs from the preferred reading in important ways, and...

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

In some cases audiences might develop interpretations that are in direct opposition to a dominant

reading. In that case, they are said to engage in oppositional decoding.

So media reception research emphasized the study of audiences as sets of people with unique, though

often shared, experiences as in charge of their own lives.

The main features of the culturalist tradition of audience research can be summarized as follows:-

The media text has to be read through the perceptions of its audience, which constructs meanings and

pleasures from the media texts offered.

The very process of media use as a set of practices and the way in which it unfolds are the central object

of interest.

Audiences for particular genres often comprise "interpretative communities" which share much the

same experience, forms of discourse and frameworks for making sense of media.

Audiences are never passive, nor are their members all equal, since some will be more experienced, or

more active fans than others.

Methods have to be qualitative and deep, often ethnographic, taking account of content, act of reception

and context together.

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