Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler

Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler
be 'closed texts', and because they are broadcast to heterogeneous audiences diverse decodings of
such texts are unavoidable.
Stuart Hall stressed the role of social positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different
social groups. In a model deriving from Frank Parkin's 'meaning systems', Hall suggested three
hypothetical interpretative codes or positions for the reader of a text (Parkin 1972; Hall 1973; Hall
1980, 136-8; Morley 1980, 20-21, 134-7; Morley 1981b, 51; Morley 1983, 109-10):
• dominant (or 'hegemonic') reading: the reader fully shares the text's code and accepts and
reproduces the preferred reading (a reading which may not have been the result of any
conscious intention on the part of the author(s)) - in such a stance the code seems 'natural'
and 'transparent';
• negotiated reading: the reader partly shares the text's code and broadly accepts the preferred
reading, but sometimes resists and modifies it in a way which reflects their own position,
experiences and interests (local and personal conditions may be seen as exceptions to the
general rule) - this position involves contradictions;
• oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') reading: 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.) (e.g. when watching a television broadcast produced on behalf
of a political party they normally vote against).
This framework is based on the assumption that the latent meaning of the text is encoded in the
dominant code. This is a stance which tends to reify the medium and to downplay conflicting
tendencies within texts. Also, some critics have raised the question of how a 'preferred reading' can
be established. Shaun Moores asks 'Where is it and how do we know if we've found it? Can we be
sure we didn't put it there ourselves while we were looking? And can it be found by examining any
sort of text?' (Moores 1993, 28). Some theorists feel that the concept may be applied more easily to
news and current affairs than to other mass media genres. David Morley wondered whether it might
be the 'reading which the analyst is predicting that most members of the audience will produce'
(Morley 1981a, 6). John Corner argues that it is not easy to find actual examples of media texts in
which one reading is preferred within a plurality of possible readings (Corner 1983, 279). As Justin
Wren-Lewis comments, 'the fact that many decoders will come up with the same reading does not
make that meaning an essential part of the text' (Wren-Lewis 1983, 184). And Kathy Myers notes, in
the spirit of a post-structuralist social semiotics, that 'it can be misleading to search for the
determinations of a preferred reading solely within the form and structure' of the text (Myers 1983,
216). Furthermore, in the context of advertising, she adds that:
There is a danger in the analysis of advertising of assuming that it is in the interests of
advertisers to create one 'preferred' reading of the advertisement's message. Intentionality
suggests conscious manipulation and organization of texts and images, and implies that the
visual, technical and linguistic strategies work together to secure one preferred reading of an
advertisement to the exclusion of others... The openness of connotative codes may mean that
we have to replace the notion of 'preferred reading' with another which admits a range of
possible alternatives open to the audience. (Myers 1983, 214-16)