http://www.fiu.edu/~interad/stuart%20hall.jpg
Photo retrieved from Florida International University
Stuart Hall, born in 1932, Kingston, Jamaica, is a key theorist in the field of media communications in United Kingdom. He studied at University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and obtained a Master of Arts from Merton College. Hall deals with issues of “hegemony, etc., in a post-Gramscian way. Hall broadly follows the Institutional approach to language and culture, placing language use within a framework of power, institutions, and systems of politics and economics� (Bicket, 2003).
In the 1950s, Start Hall launched two socialist journals, The New Reasoner and New Left Review. He also wrote a number of influential books starting from the earliest,
Stuart Hall developed reception theory which is extracted from the book ‘Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse’; it offers an admittedly “rudimentary paradigm to help explain the semiotics of dominant meanings and how such meanings can have different readings� (Hall, 1980) Despite the focus in this book refers to television and first published in 1973, Hall’s (1980) model “can be applied to a general communication theory.�
Stuart Hall has attempted to address theoretically the issue of how audiences make sense of media texts, differing from Althusser in emphasizing more scope for diversity of response to media texts. Hall model suggests three hypothetical interpretation codes for audience of the text, dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings. Hall argued that “dominant or mainstream ideology is typically inscribed as preferred reading in a media text but that the reader does not automatically adopt this. The social situations of readers, viewers, and listeners may lead them to adopt different stances. However, ‘negotiated' readings which are produced by those who inflect the preferred reading to take account of their social position; and 'oppositional' readings which are produced by those whose social position puts them into direct conflict with the preferred reading.� (Hall, 1980:180) Hall’s argument is strong and covers most members of the media audience. We accept the dominant ideology in mainstream media preferred reading, except some of the audience will look in between the lines of negotiated reading or reject the reading and think in favour of our own reading of the text oppositional reading.
The framework is based on the assumption that media messages are encrypted with dominant code. Critics questioned Hall’s model on how to establish a preferred reading. John Corner argues that “it is not easy to find actual examples of media texts in which one reading is preferred within a plurality of possible readings� (quoted by Chandler, 2004). As Justin Wren-Lewis comments, “the fact that many decoders will come up with the same reading does not make that meaning an essential part of the text� (quoted by Chandler, 2004). Lastly, Kathy Myers notes, “in the spirit of a post-structuralist social semiotics, that 'it can be misleading to search for the determinations of a preferred reading solely within the form and structure' of the text� (quoted by Chandler, 2004).
References
Bicket, Douglas. (2003) “K.I.S.S. of panopticon�, retrieved October 22, 2004, from http://www.geneseo.edu/~bicket/panop/author_H.htm.
Chandler, Daniel (2004) “Media Communications Studies: Encoding and Decoding�, Retrieved October 22, 2004 from http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem08c.html.
Hall, Stuart. "Photo", retrieved October 25, 2004 from http://www.fiu.edu/~interad/Summer2004.htm
Hall, Stuart. (1980) “Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies�, 1972-1979, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, pp. 128-138.
Kelvin Khoo 01:51, 25 Oct 2004 (EST)
