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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 96

5. SOUND AND MOTION

The previous two chapters indicated that the media for printed words and images are
in a state of transition, where new generic and technological forms tend to dissolve
the borders between and around these circuits. Still, they have a long tradition of rela-
tively stabile institutions of production, distribution and consumption that safeguard
their identity. The media for storing and transmitting sounds and pictures in motion
are relatively more recent, with key innovations starting in the late nineteenth
century. They are therefore somewhat less fixated and more porous, but as these
temporally organized media circulate in specific forms through the shopping envi-
ronment, they deserve a separate treatment as a distinct media circuit here, in turn
subdivided into partly overlapping flows for music, films, radio and television.
In quantitative terms, media for sound and moving pictures are clearly dominant
in our times – in Sweden they together make up for roughly 75 per cent of the
average daily mass-media use, though it should be noted that these statistics exclude
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phone talking and watching various kinds of images. In any case, ‘audio-visual’
media have been so strongly present in modern everyday life over the last century that
they are often seen to define a whole phase of media history, after the oral and print
eras. Today records, films and videos tend to merge into one media circuit by the
DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) format combined with networked digital computers
capable of storing and transferring film and music files. This is part of a general devel-
opment where different media circuits intersect and no single medium can any longer
operate in isolation from other media. The phenomenon of remediation introduced
in Chapter 2 is evident in the diffuse media circuit for sound and moving pictures.
There is no universally valid terminology here. The term ‘audio-visual media’ seems
for instance too wide since books and photos are also visual, and ‘electronic media’ is
likewise problematic in a time where electronics is not even confined to digital
cameras but is integrated in virtually all media technologies. One might argue for
reusing the old term ‘telegraphy’ as shorthand for all ways to telecommunicate, even
so-called interactive ones, and thereby to regard telephoning, televising, telephoto-
graphing, telegramming and SMS-ing as one media circuit. That would then imply
a wide and general semiotic concept of text as any kind of inscription in any kind of
material substrate (‘-graphy’), and thus applicable to all kinds of symbolic commu-
nication. However, conventional definitions of media circuits linger on and
according to them ‘telegraphy’ still refers to an old and nowadays outmoded form of
tele-communication. Also, such an extended interpretation of ‘telegraphy’ would not
make the boundary to photography and books any clearer. It is possible to discern a
wide circuit of media involving watching and listening to images, words and sounds