B) Audience

JOHN HARTLEY

- Was the first to analyse television from a cultural perspective and is now considered a defining publication in the field.

The Hartley Classification

There are 7 socially groupd categories when it comes to looking at and identifying audiences:

• Self - ambitions or interest of the audience
• Gender
• Age Group
• Class - different social classes e.g. working, upper etc. 
• Ethnicity
• Family
• Nation

Hartley also suggests that INSTITUTIONS produce: 

- "Invisible fictions of the audience which allow the institutions to get a sense of who they must enter into relations with"

In simple terms, they must know their audience to be able to target them effectively. 

STUART HALL

Suggested three different ways that an audience can respond to a media text:

- Preferred or Dominant reading

- Negotiated readings

- Oppositional or Resistant readings

One text cannot have a static meaning as we do not know how it is going to be read. 

Preferred or Dominant Reading

This is when the audience reads it really closely to what the producer intended.  This is much more likely to happen when the reader's social and cultural experiences match that of the producer.

Negotiated Readings

Where the audience goes through some sort of negotiation with themselves to allow them to accept the way that the text is presented.  It might be that they agree with some bits but not the others.

Oppositional or Resistant Readings

This is when the user is in conflict with the text due to their beliefs.  Such as narrative who portrays an adulterer sympathetically will be in conflict with a person whose culture says adultery is wrong.

RECEPTION THEORY

This theory recognises the audience as an essential element in the creative process.  States that the meaning is part of the relationship between text and audience.

This is STUART HALL amongst others, encoding, decoding, different reading types.  

Reception theory is an approach to textual analysis, focusing on the scope for "negotiation" and "opposition" on the part of the audience.  This means that a 'text', is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experiences.

The meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is actually created within the relationship between the text and the reader.

What do we interpret from a message?

Stuart Hall stressed the role of social positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups.  Hall suggested three hypothetical interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text .