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in many cases, machines are also needed to use and interpret media texts. Some kind
of apparatus is definitely needed if you want to hear the music or see the film that is
loaded on a digital disk. It is those machines necessary for (certain) media consump-
tion that are the main focus of this chapter. Print media usually do not need any
hardware, whereas hardware is central to audio-visual media, and the previous
chapter has already gone into them in detail. Here, we treat hardware separately from
software because it is often bought and sold in separate shops and thus engages
phenomenologically different ‘tracks’ of selection and use. Hi-fi equipment, mobile
phones and computers therefore deserve special treatment in this overview of media
consumption starting from a shopping centre. This chapter will also be an opportu-
nity to develop the hardware side of those media circuits discussed before, high-
lighting connections between various media circuits. We also include telephones and
computers, media that are less obviously sold and consumed as commercial texts and
thus tend to be neglected when studying mass-consumed media texts.
The borders between different kinds of media hardware are blurred. Many
machines can be used both for production and for reproduction in consumption: a
tape recorder can be used for listening to music but also for recording and making
music. Some hardware also includes functions of distribution, mediating between
production and consumption. This is particularly true for the hybrid Internet-
computer-cellphone combination where each machine enables multiple, interrelated
and overlapping functions. It is, however, in most cases still possible to discern
different kinds of media hardware use, and to distinguish the roles and effects of
hardware from other elements of the media world.

DOUBLE MEDIA
The definition of media and of ‘a medium’ is a contestable social compromise rather
than a fixed and universal concept. Sometimes it is textual types like books, CDs or
television programmes that are classified as media, at other times media definitions
refer to types of (production- or reception-oriented) media hardware such as printing
presses, record players or television sets. These texts and machines are connected in
social and institutional media circuits including media producers, genres and users as
well as all technologies entering into the circulating process. Both hardware and soft-
ware do mediate and may thus be seen as media, but it is the socially constituted
media circuits that define the main media categories. When we talk of ‘book media’,
for instance, we usually refer to the whole institutional circuit binding together
publishers, printing technologies, printed volumes, text genres and readers. The term
‘book’ is then used metaphorically (or rather as a synecdoche – a part of a phenom-
enon used to signify the whole phenomenon in question) to refer to the whole media
circuit in which the book as such is a prime element. Those encompassing circuits are
socially defined and in historical flux, since their definitions and mutual boundaries
are open to change, depending on developments in cultural industries and markets,
technologies, genres and forms of daily life.
Let us call those media that for their use require specific combinations of textual

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