COMM 444 - Reception Analysis (prezi) PDF

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A. Reception Analysis a. Reception analysis takes a closer look at what is actually going on when an audience encounters a media text b. It provides an analysis of how audience perceive a certain media message, what meanings do they drive, how do they associate to it, what events of their and other’s life do they relate to it, how do the message fulfill their needs and satisfaction and effect does that message or text has on their psychological, personal and social make up B. Reception analysis theories and their relation to media artifacts a. The mass media injects particular meanings into consumers and they take it as it comes. This is known as Hypodermic Needle Theory where the audience is considered as “mindless vessels ready to receive media messages” (Ott & Mack, 2010, p. 222). These “mindless vessels” passively absorb the mass media message and they perceive and try to adopt it in their socio cultural aspect on the basis of different gender, age and ethnicity. i. Ex. In Pepsi ad portrays a cool “Pepsi Generation” who are engaged in attractive and adventurous activities while they are consuming Pepsi. This ad not only persuades the audience to consume Pepsi but also creates a sect of people with which many viewers in the society cannot relate C. Cultivation Analysis a. Cultivation analysis is a theoretical concept of reception that predicts and explains how long perception term are formed and changed into beliefs about various aspects of the world due to long exposure to media message b. Media agenda setting? c. Uses and gratification theory? D. Stuart Hall (1932-2014) a. Born in Kingston, Jamaica; moved to England at the age of 19 b. One of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies (aka the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies) through the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England c. British cultural studies is known for an interdisciplinary approach that studies culture from various approaches: Marxism, post-structuralism, feminism, crtiical race theory i. Analyzed representations of different groups in mass media, we well as interpretations of mass media by different groups ii. A highly political school of thought; British cultural studies has done a lot of work on subcultures and their potential to politically resist (esp. Youth subcultures) d. Stuart Hall is famous for his encoding/decoding model (1973) of media and culture, which is the foundation for the audience reception framework of analysis E. Encoding/Decoding Model a. The two sides of this paradigm are not equal or “perfectly symmetrical”

b. “What are called ‘distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange” c. (frameworks of knowledge | relations of production | technical infrastructure) → encoding (meaning structures 1) → programme as “meaningful” discourse → decoding (meaning structures 2) → (frameworks of knowledge | relations of production | technical infrastructure) F. 3 Positions of Viewers Decoding a Media/Cultural Artifact a. Dominant/Hegemonic Reading: i. They identify with the hegemonic position and receive the dominant message of an image or text in an unquestioning manner b. Negotiated Reading: i. They negotiate an interpretation from the image and its dominant meanings c. Oppositional Reading: i. They take an oppositional position, either by completely disagreeing with the ideological position embodied in an image or rejecting it altogether (for example, by ignoring it) G. Polysemy a. The relative openness of media texts to multiple interpretations b. Meaning can never be fully controlled by producers c. A text must be polysemic to be popular d. Fisk: popular texts must have a foundation of dominant social conventions shared by audiences e. Results in semiotic excess? f. Communal audience decoding (preferred meaning) g. The greater the semiotic excess (negotiated / oppositional meaning) of a text, the more audiences can negotiate and manage meaning h. Condit: polyvalence? i. Ceccarelli: there are three types of polysemy i. Resistive reading (audience) ii. Strategic ambiguity (text) iii. Hermeneutic depth (critic) H. Interpretive Communities? a. Reader-centered criticism b. Meaning resides in the readers and audiences of a text c. Groups who interpret texts similarly because they share similar social positions and experiences (new yorkers) d. Interpretive communities give rise to all producers of texts (projection) I. Ethnographic Research and Memory a. Ethnography? b. Memory? c. Memory-based ethnography J....