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…
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.
