Page 132 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 119

7. INTERMEDIAL CROSSINGS

The previous four chapters have travelled through a wide range of media circuits and
looked upon specific issues that each of them raise. The media world can now be put
together again. How are acts of communication and of consumption intertwined in
media use? Which general patterns and forms of interaction between people and
media can be discerned? This chapter connects back to the general themes of media
use and consumption introduced in Chapter 2, but goes further to elaborate on
distinctions and extensions of previous media studies. It will summarize implications
of the previous chapters for the understanding of how media circuits are formed and
intertwined in communicative processes of consumption, and thus prepare for the
subsequent discussion of temporal and spatial dimensions of these processes.

PASSAGES AND ENCOUNTERS
Media use consists of temporal processes, giving the encounters between media and
people a processual character, which can be pursued through consumption chains
including linked acts of selection, purchase, use and disposal of media texts and hard-
ware technology. Walter Benjamin inspired a model of passages and flows, which is
helpful when trying to understand the mix of communication and consumption in
shopping spaces. Instead of freezing media use into still moments of reception, one
may investigate the shifting passages through which media and people encounter
each other. As was explained in Chapter 2, this means restoring the full arc of
consumption acts that has been bifurcated by the division between consumption
research and media studies. Acts of media consumption add up to form a multitude
of dispersed and mutually interlocking chains of encounters between people and
media, each comprising several consecutive phases of shifting length, character and
location, and which might be broken off at any stage, as commodities may be trans-
formed into either gifts or public goods, thereby stepping out of commodity
consumption and entering one of these alternative spheres of relations between
people and media.
Late-modern shopping centres are spaces for passages (see Figure 8.1). The inner
passages over experiential thresholds have a social and material basis in specific
passages of media and people through spaces of consumption, which give rise to a
series of encounters where boundaries are transgressed or drawn. The shopping centre
is an arena for two interlaced passages: flows of people through spaces and media, and
flows of media through spaces and people. Together they give rise to several principal
kinds of encounters or meetings. 1