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market. Here, freedom of expression immediately becomes an issue of content and
thus of ethics and aesthetics.
For media machines, the situation is somewhat different, since they do not auto-
matically favour one particular kind of text: they are to some extent content-neutral.
The existence of telephones or radios does not in itself (at least not in an equally
obvious manner) determine which kinds of messages people get access to. On the
other hand, they are absolutely necessary for producing and/or consuming media
texts. In this case, freedom of expression becomes an issue of access to the techno-
logical means of production and consumption, and thus primarily of economic and
political considerations.
Access to the means of media consumption (reception) plays a slightly different
role than access to means of media production. Cheap record players are different
from cheap portable music studios. Cultural policies of distribution focus on issues
related to reception, making efforts to let all citizens enjoy the widest range of media
texts, through libraries, distribution support and public service broadcasting.
Cultural policies of production are instead concerned with control over tools for
producing texts. In certain media circuits, the border between the two is blurred, in
particular for digital media like telephones, computers and the Internet, where
production and reception are densely intertwined through interactive technology.
Media machines are communicative tools with implications for democracy. In a
tradition of political information as well as in media research, culture (both art and
entertainment) is not seen as politically or materially significant, and the public
sphere is effectively reduced to its political branch. This underestimates the role of
fun, form and fiction in shaping world-views, identities and social relations. This is
the result of a widespread logo- or rather verbocentrism that traditionally prioritizes
speech and writing and does not really know how to deal with images and sounds.
But there are also important efforts in cultural theory to acknowledge and under-
stand the cultural public sphere, for instance in relation to issues of citizenship. 12
The Passages project made a close study of how the state and the market were
involved in regulating media resources, and of the struggles of power and resistance
taking place within and between these systems, as well as vis-à-vis individuals and
groups in civil society. 13 We found a complex set of tensions and open struggles
between commercial actors, state authorities and individuals and groups in civil
society.
There are many kinds of citizens’ rights in modern society: civil rights (of expres-
sion and private ownership), political rights (of democracy), social rights (of
economic life resources) and cultural rights (of access to media and cultural forms).
In Sweden, almost every citizen has access to television, telephone and radio, around
four out of five to video, CD and mobile phones, closely followed by personal
computers. The cost of purchasing these machines is also constantly declining. When
they become widespread, they also become regarded as a natural or minimal resource
of everyday life, both by citizens themselves and by various state authorities. It
becomes a right but also a duty to have such machines and to be able to use them.