David Morley's Audience Analysis Theory

David Morley’s Audience Analysis Theory

In 1980, David Morley conducted a study on how people from different social positions made sense of the British television program Nationwide. Using Stuart Hall’s “encoding-decoding” model, Morley found out that audiences needed to have certain understanding of the topic to make sense of the program. He later deduced that social background in itself does not determine if one forms the “preferred” reading of the subject at hand, but rather the availability of “tools” to fully interpret the topic. Resources for decoding messages will differ between people of different social class, i.e. education; therefore creating diverse interpretations for the same media text. (Croteau et al., 2012) This counter-argument

gives rise to another approach, where audiences take a more active role in deciphering media messages. Perhaps it will be beneficial to consider alternative theories, like uses and gratification model, where audiences play a much more involved role in understanding media texts.