Page 130 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 117

This can be studied by examining how minimal standards of living are established.
In Sweden, colour TV has been seen by the National Board for Consumer Policies as
belonging to a minimum life standard for citizens since 1978, to be joined by CD
records in 1993. In 1996, video was added but just for families with children, and it
is probable that cell-phones and computers will soon be added to the list. These prod-
ucts have been transformed from luxury goods to necessities. This is not only a statis-
tical fact but also a normative demand. It is difficult to practice one’s rights as a
citizen if one does not have access to television or radio (for public information) and
de facto also to the Internet. Citizens can thus not only expect to have access to these
media, but they are also expected by state authorities to have such access.
In Sweden, there is a public enforcement service that follows certain rules for what
can be expropriated and what may be kept when people are declared bankrupt.
Media hardware and software each constitute about 15 per cent each of sales in
auctions where confiscated goods are sold. When asking the enforcement staff in
Solna about their rules and practices, it turned out that they always let families keep
one TV set and (if they had children) one video. There is thus an official right to keep
oneself informed through such media machines. This citizen media right is in a way
also an obligation, in that state authorities regard such channels as sufficient to reach
the whole population in the event of a national emergency.
The commercial market delivers tools for communication, but this delivery is
uneven and constricted by inherent limitations in that market system. There is histor-
ically a steady trend that large distributors swallow up smaller ones, and today’s media
hardware market is extremely centralized in this respect. In home electronics, for
instance, in 2000, the Expert chain in hi-fi stores had 14 per cent of the Swedish
market, 92 per cent was controlled by large chains and only 8 per cent by smaller
independent shops. This has effects on how customers can acquire media hardware,
what choices they are offered and which social and cultural contexts frame their
acquisition, as chain stores are for instance generally less locally specific.
Were there traces in Solna Centre of civil society based resistance against such
commercial interests? One example was the maltreatment claims against home elec-
tronic companies made to the National Board for Consumer Policies. Between 1995
and 2000 there were 2,700 such cases, more than 70 per cent from private indi-
viduals, and three-quarters of these came from male customers. A predominant cause
for complaint was misleading marketing, and some discontented consumers have
become real activists by publishing lists of bad firms on the Internet and by opening
websites for debate and mutual support. 14 Another form of resistance through
disobedience is pirating, which is widespread in the case of media software among
young people (games, records, films, and so on), but less so in hardware, except for
accessories to media machines (phone shells and the like).
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early modern public sphere was
largely based on communication through print media: papers and books. These
remain important media of the political and cultural public spheres of today. Most
of the later media additions depend on hardware machines for their use by

Hardware Machines 117