Stewart Hall come up with the reception theory in the 1970's.
Hall says that the text does not have a meaning, and that it potentially has many meanings. Each has a particular meaning for a certain person, for example culture, gender, social status, religion etc.
This theory is not all about the audience, as there is 2 parts to the process: encoding and decoding.
Someone who creates a text encode what they want it to mean - how they dress, their actions, how they speak etc.
The audience decode the meaning, they interpret for example the camera angles.
The audience may see the text differently to how the creator wants them to encode it, and this gives power to the audience and the creator.
There are three basic readings we can decode which include:
The dominant reading - which is the way most people will understand the text and this fits into the original meaning.
The negotiated reading - which is basically seen in the same way as the dominant reading, but because of something particular about someone, they see it in a slightly different way.
The oppositional meaning - which is taken in a completely different way for example a strongly feminist reading of a film.
