encoding and decoding

Hall addressed the issue of how people make sense of media texts, presenting three hypothetical methods

1. The "preffered" reading
2. The "negotiated" reading
3. The "oppositional" reading

Different social situations lead to different social stances
The social position of some audiences puts them in direct conflict with the dominant position.

When an audience interprets the message as it was meant to be understood, they are operating in the dominant code. This results in a "prefferred" reading.

In a dominant-preffered reading, producers and the audience are in harmony, understanding, communicating, and sharing mediated signs in the established mindset of framing.
Not all audiences may understand what media producers may take for granted. There may be some acknowledgement of differences in understanding.

Negotiated positions are the result of the audience struggling to understand the dominant position or experiencing dissonance with those views.
These media consumers understand a text's contextual inflections and decode its messages by oppositional means

Oppositional audiences operate with an "oppositional" code which understands dominant hegemonic positions but finds framework to refute them
Stuart Hall believes that this position is necessary to begin a struggle in discourse or the "politics of signification"

My intro was about prostitution and the men trying to get the girl back, there are different ways the audience can react to the message I am trying to put accross. Stuart Hall came up with a theory, taking about preffered, negotiated and oppositional readings. My preffered reading for my intro is if the audience is in agreement to the message I was trying to put across about men taking advantage of woman and understanding the meaning I was trying to encode into my intro. My negotiated reading would be if my did not fully understand what I meant by the meaning of my intro but trying to pick out bits that they agree with but also have bit that they dissagree with.

My Opposional reading would be the audience completely disagreeing with the message I was trying to encode into my media text.