Dissertation session - Design and Accessibilities

DESIGN AND ACCESSIBILITY

Design - Audience

A - B

Shannon and Weaver

Source - encoder - channel (noise) - decoder - Destination

Context - Semiotics

Audience theory

- Class

- Race

- Sex

- Gender

Mass Audience

Frankfurt school - Adorno

Effects model - Hypodermic syringe

Reception Theory

David Morley (1980) Preferred reading / dominant reading / oppositional / negotiated 

Uses & Gratifications model (receptional theory extention)

Death of an Author

IN RELATION TO TOPIC

Brand watching - Giles Lury

Hypodermic Syringe

The brand is making you buy

Visual aesthetic for working class

COMMUNICATION THEORY Chapter

ANALYSIS of Tesco brand

http://sonamjourno.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/hypodermic-needle-theory-magic-bullet.html

The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behavior change.

Several factors contributed to this "strong effects" theory of communication, including:

- the fast rise and popularization of radio and television

- the emergence of the persuasion industries, such as advertising and propaganda

- the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s, which focused on the impact of motion pictures on children, and

- Hitler's monopolization of the mass media during WWII to unify the German public behind the Nazi party

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MAinTV/morleynw.html

Morley outlined three hypothetical positions (adapted from Frank Parkin) which the reader of a programme might occupy (1983, pp. 109-10; see also 1981b, p. 51 and 1992, p. 89):


• Dominant (or 'hegemonic') reading: The reader shares the programme's 'code' (its meaning system of values, attitudes, beliefs and assumptions) and fully accepts the programme's 'preferred reading' (a reading which may not have been the result of any conscious intention on the part of the programme makers).
• Negotiated reading: The reader partly shares the programme's code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but modifies it in a way which reflects their position and interests.
• Oppositional ('counter-hegemonic') reading: The reader does not share the programme's code and rejects the preferred reading, bringing to bear an alternative frame of interpretation.
Morley argues that 'members of a given sub-culture will tend to share a cultural orientation towards decoding messages in particular ways. Their individual "readings" of messages will be framed by shared cultural formations and practices' (1981b, p. 51).
Summaries and commentaries on the responses of each of the groups interviewed in Morley's NWA study are presented here in the order in which he places them in the spectrum of readings from 'dominant', via 'negotiated', to 'oppositional'.