Active Audience Theory > Encoding-Decoding (Stuart Hall, 1980)

Stuart Hall suggests that the audience does not simply passively accept a text. There are, in his views, three ways in which audiences can read or decode and understand a text:



Stuart Hall suggests that the audience does not simply passively accept a text. There are, in his views, three ways in which audiences can read or decode and understand a text:

1.  Preferred Reading/Dominant Hegemonic - when an audience inerprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. The producers and the audience are in harmony 
2. Negotiated Reading - Not all audiences may understand what media producers take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding. Audiences will understand the over-riding dominant ideologies within the text but they may not agree with all the views/ideas; audiences will make their own ground rules to get to the agreed dominant ideology (they will take a different path). 
3. Oppositional Reading/'counter-hegemonic' – when an audience understands the context of the media text but they will decode the text in a completely different way; opposing the encoded text