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delimiting opportunities for media use, thus enabling and restricting various kinds of
social action.
One example is when mobile phone users create a space for talk – a virtual parlour
– around themselves. Such a communication space creates a bridge connecting the
two speakers across physical distance, while erecting a wall that separates them from
people in their immediate vicinity. Someone chatting on his cellphone makes him-
or herself incommunicable to those who happen to be physically close, but can share
only half of the electronically mediated dialogue. Together with the ways in which
patterns of media use distinguish different kinds of people according to class, gender,
age, ethnicity and taste orientation, this spatial dialectic shows how media not only
transgress borders and distances, but also create them. Another example is the use of
video by families to control the temporal rhythms of everyday life, using time shifting
in order to reconcile conflicting interests of adults and children into a functional
structure of media use. 11

POWER OF ACCESS
Communication is a form of power, demanding that people listen, see and make
sense of symbolic forms of various shapes. By arguing in words, sounds and images
we can strive to affect other’s ideas and actions, and by spreading sensuous and affec-
tive expressions the moods and behaviour of audiences can also be more or less delib-
erately manipulated. Communicative power interacts in both directions with other
forms of power – in particular with the strategic power of money (the market) and
political administration (the state). Economic and political forces frame and steer the
execution of communicating force, which in turn – through debates and discourses
in the public sphere – simultaneously binds and delimits the range of pure commer-
cial profit or state authority. The position of media machines in this configuration is
thus also a position of power. This is particularly clear in the case of media machines
that are more or less openly subject to intense negotiation and regulation by societal
institutions.
The sounds and images streaming from TV screens and loudspeakers in the shop-
ping centre influenced visitors’ movements, more or less consciously. Even a turned-
off monitor can make people move around it or watch the screen (in vain). Media
machines can thus be tools that the centre and shop managers use to control the flow
of people through their premises.
A basic condition for communicative power is access to the means of media
production and/or consumption. Through regulation by censorship, legislation, taxa-
tion and subsidies, the state tries to regulate media access – positively by guaranteeing
public resources, freedoms and rights, and negatively by restricting abuse. Through
marketing strategies and other forms of competition, businesses likewise do their best
to manipulate conditions in favour of their own market shares. For single media, and
for media texts in general, censorship and public service are central issues of debate
and struggle between the conflicting interests of civil society, the state and the

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