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In a nutshell...

  • Morley's audience theory found that people from different social backgrounds, occupations and surroundings receive media texts differently.
  • The producers of these media texts (encoders) would have intended a meaning which the audience (decoder) would receive differently depending on these social factors.
  • There are 3 different ways a reader can receive a media text: Oppositional, Negotiated and Dominant.

Morley and Stuart Hall

Research Findings

  • Management groups produced dominant readings.
  • Teacher training students and university arts students produced negotiated readings.
  • Trade union groups characteristically produced oppositional or negotiated readings.

Black college students, however, "fail[ed] to engage with the discourse of the programme enough to reconstruct or redefine it".

The initial conclusion was that decodings cannot be solely due to the socioeconomic status of the decoder, as members of the sample from the same class location produced different readings. However, media critic Sujeong Kim's re-analysis of the project's findings suggests that 'audience's social positions ... structure their understandings and evaluations of television programmes in quite consistent directions and patterns.' Also, middle class viewers produced negotiated readings of one particular programme, while working class viewers produced dominant or oppositional readings dependent on their gender and race.

  • Morley's research on the Nationwide Project stemmed from Stuart Hall's development of reception theory. (Hall's theory of encoding and decoding)
  • It is a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, disseminated (spread), and interpreted.
  • His model claims that TV and other media audiences are presented with messages that are decoded, or interpreted in different ways depending on an individual's cultural background, economic standing, and personal experiences.
  • Hall presented the idea that audience members can play a role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts, and might be capable of changing messages themselves.
  • The dominant reading could also be known as the hegemonic reading in Hall's theory.

The focus on the reader (or "audience") and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other theories that focus on the author or the content and form of the work.

Reception Theory

The Nationwide Project

Model devised by Stuart Hall to explore the ways in which the meanings of media texts can vary in line with their circumstances of production and consumption.

From the 1970s, researchers from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) researched into the relationship between texts and audiences. One of these was The Nationwide Project by David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon.

The Nationwide Project was media audience research project where Morley conducted qualitative research with various different people from different educational and occupational backgrounds. He observed different responses to a clip of its budget special to see whether they would receive it with dominant, oppositional or negotiated readings.

The Media Group at the CCCS selected the BBC television current affairs programme Nationwide to study the encoding/decoding model, a part of reception theory, developed by Stuart Hall.

Reception theory is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes the reader's reception of a literary text, more commonly known as audience reception.

Different types of audience reception:

•Oppositional – people disagree with the message and reject it.

•Negotiated – On the whole, the view is agreed with but slightly altered.

•Dominant – The message is fully accepted.

David Morley - Audience Theory

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