Reception Theory

Media producers encode their movies with meaning... How do they do this, well they might use lighting to convey an emotion or a certain font to communicate themes, perhaps the clothes the characters are wearing identifies them as a goodie or a badie. The fact is there are endless ways for media producers to create layers and layers of meaning with the hope of producing a deep rich text

Now, sadly for media producers this isn't a straight forward process, hall points out that such as culture and income will all have an impact on how the audience decodes those messages. And so he argues that a text may be coded in one of three ways. The first is the....

DOMINANT Reading
This means the audience decodes the message exactly as the producer intended, thereby suggesting they share the same cultural and ideological positions... An example of an obvious Dominant reading is, in the Dark night we are meant to read the joker as a bad guy. This message is conveyed by his greasy hair makes him look dirty and unwashed, which we read as unclean and bad, the makeup masks his real face which we automatically flag as a danger because we cannot identify him as friend or foe, the heavy streaming black around his eyes exenterates the eye holes of a skull which we accentuate as death or danger it also kind of resembles running mascara which we can associate as misery and its not to mention the fact that he acts like a bad guy.

The next reading is the....

NEGOTIATED Reading
In which you understand the meaning and the connotations of the  message of the producer but you need to adapt them to fit with your own beliefs.

And finally we have the....

OPPOSITIONAL Reading
This means where the audience absolutely rejects the producers message, despite understanding the denotive and conative meanings. Sometimes the majority of audience take up an oppositional reading of a text, or even ban together to try and make people realize how it can be read in an offensive way.