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consumers. Double and triple media add new dimensions to issues of access and of
freedom of expression and reception. Media hardware is therefore increasingly
important for the development of democratic freedoms and rights. It remains crucial
to discuss issues of software content, but media studies need also to analyse these
hardware issues. This implies studies of cultural industries, media technology, distri-
bution of hardware machines and their acquisition and use by institutions and indi-
vidual consumers in everyday life.

CONSUMING MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES
The modern public sphere, including its political and cultural branches, as well as the
various alternative public spheres on its margins, nowadays has the character of a
networked set of media publics, where people talk and communicate through and
with technological machines of many kinds. To access and/or produce different forms
of media content (texts), people need access to hardware. This costs money and
demands time as well as skills. Though most households have access to many kinds
of media, this is not true for all, and many actually cannot afford to buy TV sets and
DVD players – instead they rent them from Thorn or other rental firms. This makes
their access to these forms of communication vulnerable to fluctuations in the
economy. What does it mean to be without these and other media technologies in a
late-modern society where all are supposed to be able to relate to new TV
programmes, records and websites? People lacking access are excluded from impor-
tant societal networks of information, discussion, empowerment, enjoyment, imagi-
nation and recreation.
This book started with a critique of the one-dimensional view of the consumer as
‘economic man’. In this chapter, however, it has become clear that economic aspects
also have key importance for cultural, social and political media issues. ‘It is not the
economic origins of culture that will be presented, but the expression of the economy
in its culture,’ Walter Benjamin once wrote about his Arcades project. 15 A study of
communication hardware offers strong evidence of such expression of the economy
in media culture. Studying media as commodities and mediated communication as a
consumption process highlights economic aspects that need to be acknowledged in
cultural studies. There is no contradiction in combining elements of political
economy and critical theory, including ideas from Benjamin and Habermas, with
models from hermeneutics and cultural studies. Instead, such combinations help us
understand how economy and culture is increasingly intertwined in late-modern
societies.
To conclude, this chapter has dealt with two main themes. The complex inter-
twining of consumption and communication processes in double and triple media is
one of them; the issues of access and power is the other. Together, these themes indi-
cate how recent developments of advanced media technologies have demanded a
renewed reflection on basic issues of mediated communication – in media research as
well as in public debate.