Audience Theory and Representation

Students of media are taught that media texts do not present a neutral, transparent view of reality, but offer instead a mediated re-presentation of it. The processes by which audience members come to understand media texts in terms of how they seem to relate to people, ideas, events, themes and places. This is a very complex idea, as the reader of a media text will play an active role in constructing these meanings him/herself. At its most simple, it is how media texts are understandable.

Some media theorists that could be incorporated into a discussion of representation:

Stuart Hall


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTzMsPqssOY


Stuart Hall suggests that there are three different positions that the reader of a text can occupy when trying to interpret a text, they are:

• Preferred Reading
• Negotiated Reading
• Oppositional Reading

Preferred reading is when the reader fully shares the text's codes and accepts and reproduces the preferred reading i.e. the most dominant reading.
Negotiated reading is when the reader partly shares the text's codes and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests - this position involves contradictions.

Oppositional reading is when the reader, whose social situation places them in a directly oppositional relation to the dominant code, understands the preferred reading but does not share the text's code and rejects this reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of reference (radical, feminist etc.).

In this instance a 'code' can be interpreted as what a text says.

Roland Barthes:
Roland Barthes concentrated some of his work on a discussion of how myth operates in society and he discussed this in the context of denotation and connotation.
Connotation and denotation are often described in terms of levels of representation or levels of meaning.
Denotation - the literal, 'obvious' or 'commonsense' meaning of an image.
Connotation - is used to refer to the socio-cultural and 'personal' associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of the image. These are typically related to the interpreter's class, age, gender, ethnicity and so on. Images are more open to interpretation - in their connotations than their denotations.
Ferdinand de Saussure:
Semiotics is the study of the social production of meaning from sign systems. A sign could be made up of something which physically resembles the object in some way (icon), or has a direct link between it and its object, it is somehow connected i.e. smoke indicates fire (index) or it can be something with no resemblance at all and it communicates only because people agree that it shall stand for what it does (symbol).
The reading of a sign is determined by cultural experience of the reader. Semiotics pays great attention to the role of the reader in realising and producing meanings out of texts.