Page 113 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 100

100 Consuming Media

CONSUMING MUSIC AND FILM
While most print media tend to be mainly used individually, tapes and records can
more easily be used by many people simultaneously. A distinction between the social
and private use of music and films is emphasized by their differentiated types of hard-
ware, from fixed collective hi-fi sets and projectors to portable disk and MP3 players
designed solely for individual use. Reception studies have emphasized that the use of
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a medium like video is strongly embedded in social and cultural contexts. In a
process since the mid 1970s, video has become domesticated and is today frequently
used as a core technology within the family circle. The domestic character of video is
a prolongation of the way television – the medium it is usually used in combination
with – became a form of family entertainment in the 1950s and 1960s. The domestic
integration of both these media forms has at times been met with critique and resist-
ance, and is in some respects still a controversial subject. Parents, for instance, are
aware of the discourse on the impropriety of using video or television as babysitter,
but also of the difficulties avoiding it. The same goes for teenage peer groups, where
the use of DVDs is deeply embedded in a wider normative discourse on proper
education and upbringing.
Moral as well as taste standards are therefore activated by the use of videos. This is
reflected in the decision of Video 48 Hours not to offer its customers pornography,
although, according to the shop staff, this decision was based on commercial as well
as moral considerations. The mainstream orientation of Video 48 Hours might
explain why few challenges to legitimate taste and moral standards could be detected
among its customers. Film swappers and other social groups involved in such chal-
lenges tend to build their own networks for the procurement and exchange of more
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or less controversial films. This is an example of how commercial media circuits may
be transformed into social circuits, like fan or collector circuits, by people who
organize their own networks of cooperation, information and exchange. As a step in
what Kopytoff calls ‘the biography of things’, videos, DVDs and records are used in
a diversity of ways, depending on in what social and cultural context they are
embedded, after they have been sold and bought for the first time. 7
One such re-embedding context is made up of people’s own music making.
During our fieldwork in Solna Centre, we encountered a girl rock group called
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Miss Gandalf, whose four members were 16–17 years old. They rejected the main-
stream orientation of Mix Records: ‘They have nothing to offer, no good records
and if they have a good record it’s too expensive. And on top of it, the shop is filled
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with boy groups and other scary things.’ They also preferred old vinyl gramo-
phones as vehicles for sound transmission rather than ‘light’ equipment such as
portable CD players or mini-disks. 10 In the same vein, the only record shop in
Solna that passed their critical judgement – apart from the quarterly arranged
record fair – was a small second-hand shop. Otherwise they preferred shopping for
records in Stockholm. By using records primarily as an inspiration for their own
music making, the band members blurred the borderline between production and