Audience Reception Theory

Stuart Hall

Audience Reception Theory is also known as reception analysis, the audience reception theory is widely used as a way of characterizing the influx of audience research which occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Audience reception theory can be traced back to British Sociologist Stuart Hall and his essay titled "Encoding/Decoding." Hall proposed a new model of mass communication which highlighted the importance of active interpretation within relevant codes. Hall's theory put forward three central premises: 1) the same event can be encoded in more than one way; 2) the message contains more than one possible reading; and 3) understanding the message can be a problematic process, regardless of how natural it may seem.

These premises highlight the way a product can be complicated, in that have different genres and meanings to the audience. The product can be viewed in different ways due to the audience's unique experiences in life, and how it causes them to view the product in different ways due to that. Because of these different views on the product, he coined the terms of 'dominant', 'negotiated' and 'oppositional' readings these can describe the different readings of the audiences.

'Dominant' readings are produced by those whose social situation favours the preferred reading that the producer wants the audience to have; 'negotiated' readings are produced by those who accommodate the preferred reading to take account of their social position; and 'oppositional' readings are produced by those whose social position puts them into direct conflict with the preferred reading.

The audience reception theory is important because when creating a piece the producer needs to think about what type of reading they want for their product, whether they want discussion about the meanings of the signifiers within the audience or whether they want a piece that the audience has no question about.

For my own piece I would want discussion about the meanings within it because if the product causes a stir it means more people are talking about it and it means that it is promoted more. A good example of this is the film 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (1986), the film has many negotiated readings surrounding it with some viewers believing that Ferris is just a figment of Cameron's imagination and that the whole day is made up in Cameron's mind. Others just view it as an American-teen comedy film.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_reception