Hypodermic Needle Theory and Stuart Hall's reception Theory

The hypodermic needle theory is an outdated belief system about how audiences receive texts, the theory if from the 1920s. Basically the theory means that people watch a texts and then engage with the specific texts and then want to do what they have just seen. For example, someone watching a murder scene in a film, or in a music video and then someone going out to do what they have just seen. We are passive receivers, we just watch the text and let it absorb over us. We have no part in interpreting the information, we simply receive it and believe it.


Stuart Halls theory is that he disagreed with the hypodermic needle, and basically he says that everyone brings there own message and opinions into the media text. People react to the media  dependent on there own life experiences - If we agree with the writers message, this is called the preferred reading, however we might have a negotiated reading where out own cultural and life experiences affect our interpretation. Or... we might go further and create an oppositional reading where we question or challenge the message given to us.
Jay-Z has encoded the song with the message that he has a lot of problems  but women are not one of them, for example he doesn't bother with women because they are just 'problems' he has other problems to deal with - This is the message i got from this music video, by interoperating the lyrics and the video.
Media producers encode a media text with their ideological values, creating the preferred reading and audiences.


Audience members/decoders
Hall suggests that we receive the ideological message differently according to our own life experiences. We might agree with the preferred reading, or we may come up with a negotiated reading where our own cultural and life experiences bring a different interpretation. Or.. we might go even further and create an oppositional reading where we question or challenge the message given to us.


Harry Brown
I think the dominant reading from the producer is that he wanted to make people aware about drugs and violence and knife/gun crime that is current in our lives today. We hear about these kinds of crimes on the news, and the producer has taken these news stories and turned them into a film, and he lets us see the 'behind the scenes' of what happens with these crimes, and then there is this rouge pensioner which is just there to add to the film however the story about knife crime and violence is the key message in this film.
The way that I read (Negotiated reading) this film is that there is crime in parts of London that look like they do in the film, and we all know as a nation that this kind of things happen, but it is interesting to see what kind of investigation goes on into these crimes, and how the police and detectives react to these problems, on the other hand I think that I don't agree that the things that happen in the film, happen in real life to that extent, the film is somewhat exaggerated. However if I was younger and didn't entirely understand the film, and all the aspects of the film, I wouldn't understand the messages that the producer is trying to get across I would only watch the film for entertainment. 
I was attracted to this film because of the actors but the main attraction for me watching this film was because of the way people recommended this film, and this made me watch Harry Brown.