Stuart Hall

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED + WHAT I CAN APPLY

StuartMcPhail Hall, was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. 

He looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups. He believed that the mass media create and define issues of public concerns and interest through audience positioning. 

He came up with a model suggesting three ways in which we may read a media text:

1. Dominant reading - Where the reader fully accepts the preferred reading so that the code seems natural and transparent.
2. The negotiated reading - The reader partly believes the code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes modifies it in a way, which reflects their own position, eperience and interest 
3. The opposiotional reading - The readers social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code. They reject the reading.