Stuart Hall proposed audience positioning, by suggesting that the mass media create and define issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning. He was concerned with the power that the media have including how it spreads idea's in particular social values, to create dominant ideologies, meaning that they frame public debate surrounding certain issues e.g. the role of women in society, asylums and immigration, the welfare system and the monarchy.
He looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups. Hall came up with a model suggesting three ways in which we may read a media text:
Encoding and Decoding
Dominant Reading - reader fully accepts the preferred reading (audience will read the text the way the author intended them to) so that the code seems natural and transparent.
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, experiences and interests.
The oppositional reading - the readers social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code. They reject the reading.
Polysemy is the capacity for a text to have multiple meanings. It is to do with how individuals interpret and decode readings in different contexts and cultures.
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