hello and welcome to my easy-to-understand guide to Stuart Hall's reception Theory not to be confused with Stuart Hall's representation theory which is different and for which there is a different video on this YouTube channel so Stuart Hall's reception theory is quite simple he basically believes that media products are encoded with ideas by the producers that make them so when you produce a product for example if you make a film that producers put in certain ideas into that film they want a particular message to come across and they do that by creating particular stories particular characters and they hope that the audience understand that message they hope the audience can decode that message and take away what is intended by the producers so that is what we call the preferred reading preferred reading means the the particular messages have been received by the audience accepted by them and that the audience totally gets what the producer wanted them to understand so for example if an audience at the time of in the 1950s were looking at a tied advert the preferred reading that the producer intended was that as a woman you should want to keep your family's clothes nice and clean and that you should absolutely buy tied because it is the best product out there however audiences are all different we're not all the same people we're not all going to respond in the same way so Stuart Hall's reception Theory has two other types of responses that audiences might take in stead of that preferred reading he thinks that some audiences are going to take the oppositional reading or positional readings are where they interpret that media product and they absolutely do not take onboard the messages that the producers wanted them to take onboard so people may have seen the Tide advert in the 1950s or they may be viewing it from a more modern time period and their reaction may be of horror they may think wow that's really sexist women aren't the only ones that do the laundry and they may be quite offended or they may think that tied absolutely is not the best product on the market and they don't take on board any of those preferred messages that the producer intended them to have the third reading is a negotiated reading which is kind of between the middle of the preferred reading and the oppositional reading so the negotiated reading in the middle is where an audience member understands the messages we kind of get what the producer intended and we accept some of those messages but we reject other parts of it so an audience member might see the tied advert and they might say well I understand the messages and tied probably is a really good product but actually I don't really want to buy a product that's just aimed at women and you may take that negotiated reading where you're accepting part of the message and rejecting part of the message reasons why people might take the preferred the negotiated or the oppositional reading very completely it could be that you are taking different readings because you're different genders or different ages or you're coming from different historical time periods it might be that you're taking different readings because you were brought up in different areas of the country or different backgrounds different ethnicities different sexualities there's a whole load of reasons why people might not all read a product in the same way so when you're looking at the products in front of you whether it's a set text or an unseen one you have to think what was the preferred reading that the producers wanted the audience to take what is the likelihood that the audiences are actually taking that preferred reading and why might an audience reject that reading are there any reasons in particular why audiences may have felt an oppositional reaction to that particular text