Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall is a media theorist who specifically focuses on audiences and how they interact with what they watch and their reactions to the story lines and each character. He explains it through the 

encoding and decoding theory.

Encoding and Decoding theory

Dominant reading – the reader fully shares the text’s code and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading in such a stance that the code seems natural.

Negotiated reading – the reader partly shares the texts and accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes 

resists and modifies it in a way that reflects their own position.

Oppositional reading – when someone watches a film or program and feels the opposite about a certain character than the director intended them to.