Aberrant Meanings

Aberrant meanings are when the received meaning is completely at odds with what meaning was meant.
This starts with the Reception Theory looked at by Stuart Hall. Hall discusses how important it is to know how your audience will view your work and make sense of it as a media text, done through a process described in one of his papers, 'Encoding/Decoding'. The 4 different ways Hall describes you can decode a media text are as follows:
1. DOMINANT READING "viewer recognises the preferred meaning and boldly agrees with it"
2. OPPOSITIONAL READING "the dominant meaning is recognised but rejected for a cultural, political or ideological reasons".
3. NEGOTIATED READING "viewer accepts, rejects or refines elements due to cultural, political or ideological reasons"

4.ABERRANT DECODING "the viewer interprets the media in a way that aligns with their own views".

The best a company/producer can do to avoid aberrant readings is to be aware of 'The Shannon and Weaver Model', showing awareness of technical, mechanical and psychological noise, however the situations of the audience may lead them to adopt different opinions, therefore it is sometimes hard not to have aberrant meanings. The model shows this through the receiver/decoder having various different experiences, expectations and history.

A very recent aberrant meaning has been from the Sainsbury's Christmas Advert. When given as a tribute to those in the war, with the warm feel of sharing at Christmas, Sainsbury's intended for this advert to be loved, however a lot of viewers where offended by the attempt. Mechanical noise for example the phone ringing may have caused someone to pay less attention to the advert and not feel the emotional aspect encoded in the advert whilst they muted the TV for the phone call, causing them to see the advert more as an act of publicity. On top of this, the psychological noise or experience may have interrupted the message if for example, they viewer knew someone in the war and felt it wasn't a true representation. Moreover, as something that had a high buzz, the viewer may have had high expectations about the trailer and were disappointed in the way it looked. All of these reasons will have caused these viewers to emerge an oppositional or aberrant meaning of the trailer.