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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 108

6. HARDWARE MACHINES

It should by now be clear that media circuits notoriously impinge on one another.
The previous three chapters started with different kinds of media texts, studying
where, when and how they are sold, bought and used. There is a kind of historic
progression between these chapters, in that print media are the oldest form of mass
media, followed by visual media and somewhat later sound and moving images
media. This is not a matter of linear succession where one media form chronologi-
cally follows and replaces the other. They work in a dynamic sequence as new media
interact with older ones, imitating and modifying them in processes of remediation,
combining with them in multimedia cooperation, hybrids or other kinds of inter-
medial relationships. Print media were the dominant form of the classic public
sphere, and papers and books remain key elements in forming opinions, with a
comparatively high social status. Visual, auditive and audio-visual media have grad-
ually extended the scope of public spaces, offering more and richer channels of
exchange, across larger distances in time and space. During recent decades, the digital
revolution of computers and global networks has accelerated these processes, leaving
no traditional media circuit and no inherited boundary untouched.
In order to approach this complex media compound systematically, this chapter
does not deal with one particular media circuit. Instead, it focuses on the machines
that are used in several of them. The historic development of media technologies has
gradually increased the number and complexity of such machines, with digitally
networked computers as a recent example. Media machines are usually called hard-
ware, in contrast to the software of those multiform texts that mediate meanings.
Mediated communication lets people interact with symbolic forms of multiple
kinds, material artefacts designed to invite the construction of meaning that is called
interpretation. These software ‘texts’ (in the widest sense of the word) are materially
embodied in, for example, stone, wood, paper, sound waves and photon streams. In
modern societies, the making, spread and use of textual artefacts increasingly often
rely on hardware, so that communication presupposes a combination of two
consumption acts, in what might be called a ‘two-step flow of media consumption’. 1
Media hardware can be required in various parts of communication processes.
Some are needed to produce media texts, with the printing press, the (still, film or
video) camera and the sound-recording microphone-and-tape device as classic exam-
ples. Such media-producing machines belong to the complicated socio-technological
apparatuses that constitute modern media. The products of such machines can some-
times be used directly by consumers and audiences. If you don’t happen to need
glasses, you can take a book, paper, placard or postcard and read it as it is. However,