Reception Theory

• Stuart Hall (1970)

He suggested that the media texts are encoded and decoded. Lots of layers to a subject, all the layers added up together to make a genre. So they create a code, then we as an audience decode that as an individual. You find yourself identifying with things and using you own experiences to relate to the media, e.g teen dramas, or comedy films.

Question u should ask yourself when reading or analysing a media text:

• who produced it?
• what/who is being represented in the text ?
• how is that thing being represented? (lighting, narrative, dialogue, location etc)
• why was the representation chosen? What might the alternatives have been?
• what frame of reference does the audience use when understanding the representation?