Media Theories

MEDIA STUDIES: THEORIES

Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory:

·        Stuart Hall’s reception theory emphasizes that media texts are encoded and decoded.

·       The producer encodes messages and ideas based on their own ideologies which are then decoded by the audience.

·       However, audiences with different ideologies will interpret media differently, and perhaps in a way that producers did not intend for.

Dominant/Preferred Reading:

·       This is how the producer wants the audience to view and interpret the media text.

·       Audience members will take this position if the messages are clear and if the audience member is of the same age and culture.

·       This was of interpretation is viewed if it has an easy to follow narrative and if it deals with themes relative to the audience.

·       E.g., The audience has decoded the Joker exactly as the producers intended – as the villain.

Oppositional Reading:

·       This is when the audience rejects the preferred reading, and creates their own meaning for the text.

·       This can happen if the media contains controversial themes that the audience member disagrees with.

·       It can also arise when the media has a complex narrative structure perhaps not dealing with themes in modern society.

·       Oppositional reading can also occur if the audience member has oppositional beliefs, ideologies, or is of a different age and culture.

·       E.g., GTA 5 may encourage that violence, drugs, etc. is cool which may be against some audience’s ideologies

 

Negotiated Reading:

·       This is a compromise between the dominant and oppositional readings, where the audience accepts parts of the producer’s views, but has their own views on parts as well.

·       This can occur if there is a combination of some of the above, e.g., the audience member likes the media, is of the same age as you, and understands some of the messages, but the narrative is complex and this inhibits full understanding.

·       E.g., the movie Pineapple Express suggest that drugs just cause harmless fun.

 

Todorov’s Narrative Theory:

·       Todorov identifies that traditionally, narrative structures follow a formula, moving forward in a chronological order with one action following after another. In other words, they have a clear beginning, middle and end.

·       Todorov also suggested that the characters in the narrative would be changed in some way through the course of the story and that this would be evident by the resolution.

·       This traditional story arc format is known as a linear narrative:

Steps:	What Happens:
1	The narrative starts with an equilibrium
2	An action or character disrupts the equilibrium
3	A quest to restore the equilibrium begins
4	The narrative continues to a climax
5	Resolution occurs and equilibrium is restored

 

Shirky’s End of Audience Theory:

·       Audience behaviour has changed due to the internet and the ability for audiences to create their own content at homes thanks to the lower cost of technology and Web 2.0. This new audience doesn’t just consume media, but also produces it – creating the term ‘prosumer’.

·       Amateur content made this way has different values to professional media producers, in that it promotes a connection between other amateur producers – they both deeply care about the products they make and can help them work together.

·       When they work together this way, audiences can make more content than producers – Wikipedia is a good example of this.

·       In the ‘old’ media, centralized producers addressed atomized consumers; in the ‘new’ media, every consumer is now a producer.

·       Traditional media producers would ‘filter then publish’; as many ‘new’ media producers are not employees, they ‘publish then filter’.

·       These amateur producers have different motivations to those of professionals – they value autonomy, competence, membership and generosity. User-generated content creates emotional connection between people who care about something. This can generate a cognitive surplus – for example, Wikipedia can aggregate people’s free time and talent to produce value that no traditional medium could match.

·      ‘The Audience’ as a mass of people with predictable behaviour is gone. Now, behaviour is variable across different sites, with some of the audience creating content, some synthesizing content and some consuming content. The ‘old’ media created a mass audience. The ‘new’ media provides a platform for people to provide value for each other.

 

The Hypodermic Needle Theory:

·       This theory was one of the earliest ways of thinking about how the mass media influences audiences.

·       It was developed in the 1920s and 1930s after researchers observed the effect of propaganda during WW1 and events like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast.

·       This theory is a linear communication theory which suggests that media messages are injected directly into the brains of a passive audience.

·       It suggests that we all respond to media messages in the same way.

·       Despite this way of thinking that is no longer really accepted, the Hypodermic Needle Theory continues to influence the way we talk about media.

·       People believe that the mass media has a powerful effect. Parents worry about the influence of TV and violent video games. News outlets run headlines like ‘Is Google making us stupid’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto led teen to kill’.

 

Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory:

·       The term “male gaze” was first coined in 1975 by Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure”. Throughout the work, Mulvey explores the phenomenon of the male gaze, a perspective that serves to segment the female body into pieces that dehumanize the woman and subjects all viewers to a presumed heterosexual male viewpoint. At its heart, it is about portraying women as an object to be viewed and, by extension, the man as a subject doing the viewing and acting.

·       For example, Marilyn Monroe’s character in The River of No Return (1954) is subject to the male gaze in a way that treats her like an ornamental object. Through a sexualized outfit and the lounging position she assumes, she becomes an object to be viewed, both by the audience of the film and the predominantly male audience within the room of the scene.

·       The term “Visual Pleasure” can easily be applied to other media such as video games and television where it can be much more subtle than panning camera angles. It can be something as simple as choices, the way a female character speaks or moves, or where a still camera angle falls that centralizes sexualized areas of the body.

·       Character animation, which can be a wonderful tool for all sorts of creative expression, is often used in limiting and stereotypical ways to sexualize female characters.

·       This is one of the many ways that games are predominantly designed around the male gaze, and we see male characters who are wearing little clothing are not objectified in the way that female characters are.

·       Ultimately, the male gaze is a theoretical concept that explores the nuanced ways our culture influences media and, in turn, the way media perpetuates troubling gender dynamics in our culture.