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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 101

consumption. Also, the contemporary diversity of music transmission technologies
promoted a reflexive and critical attitude towards those media, which were system-
atically integrated into their judgement of different kinds of music and thereby had
lost any sense of transparent immediacy. 11 A similar drift towards hypermediacy is
found in the use of videos and DVDs, where the introduction of the latter
medium, and its commonly acknowledged superior visual and auditory qualities,
has drawn attention to these media in themselves. This tendency is counterbal-
anced by the representational character of audio-visual media, in that the DVD
medium claims to give a more ‘realistic’ and ‘total’ film experience than the video.
This is further reinforced by home movie equipment, which has adapted domestic
film experience to cinema standards. These interacting tensions between hyper-
mediacy and immediacy in video use are also found in the use of music media, but
were not prominent in Miss Gandalf’s discourse on music. Maybe these tensions
are hidden by music’s supposedly non-representational character, which makes it
hard to discern a relation between an auditory medium and what it represents.
Still, while a studio recording may be heard as an autonomous artefact, judgements
of live recordings often thematize the degree to which they capture the atmosphere
of a ‘real’ public performance.
The use of audiovisual media is part of the routinization of domestic life. All media
use follows routines and customs, but the watching of television, videos or DVDs,
and the listening to radio and music are among the media activities that get most
time in domestic settings. 12 Video has become an important time management tool
for co-ordinating TV watching with domestic duties and other activities. Recording
programmes on video and saving them for more suitable occasions has become a
daily routine among some of our informants, who often recorded new programmes,
deleting the old ones before they had time to watch them, while saving others as cher-
ished gems for repeated enjoyment. In this way, videos as well as CDs can become
objects of more or less systematic collecting.

DILEMMAS OF COLLECTING
The collector is a paradoxical consumer: on the one hand, a true hero of consump-
tion, always looking for something thrilling to acquire, but on the other hand repu-
diating any hedonistic consumption mentality. The motive for acquiring cherished
possessions does not seem wholly selfish, since it is permeated by care for the objects
in themselves. Such paradoxes make it interesting to take a closer look at the practice
of collecting in general. Who becomes a collector and why? When do media items
form a collection? There are media-specific distinctions between collecting pictures
and collecting records, but also cases where these distinctions are blurred. Through
history many media have turned into collector items. Benjamin identified a relation-
ship between changing patterns of media consumption and collecting, describing
collecting as a practice that adapts and transforms itself according to the historical
development of commodity production and media innovations. This transformable
capacity is reflected in the elusive character of the phenomenon of collecting.

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