Page 133 - Consuming Media

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120 Consuming Media

FIG. 7.1. Passages of media and people through consumption spaces.

First of all, people encounter media in processes of consumption and communication.
Such encounters may sometimes lead to some kind of interpenetration. In processes
of reception, media flow through people who make meanings by interpretations of
the media texts they use, so that media are incorporated into people’s lives, minds and
bodies. Conversely, people flow through media as representations, where media texts
are populated by symbolic representations of human subjects.
A second general kind of encounter occurs between people in forms of social inter-
action. People meet each other in front of media (talking in front of a newspaper
placard) or through them (by using mobile phones). These interactions may lead to
mutual interpenetration in the shape of identification, through which individuals
influence each other’s understandings of themselves and of others.
A third main kind of encounter is the intermediality between different technologies
and texts in encounters on bookshelves or in the streets. Here again, texts may not
only stand beside but also penetrate each other, in processes of intertextuality, where
mediated texts are criss-crossed by other texts, through open or candid references.
All these passages and encounters may lead either to transgressing contacts and
hybrid fusions or to confrontations and separations. It is due to these encounters that
the passages of consumption are communicative practices, since they entail a
meaning-making interplay between subjects and texts in contexts, when consump-
tion develops into reception and representation. The spatial framing of these
processes in a shopping centre may at first seem self-evident, but quickly turns out to
be an extraordinarily ambiguous space, replete with liminal zones and a lack of
consensus among people as to where its borders are. Sometimes, it is perceived as a
relatively clearly delimited building unit, while at others it may not even be noted as
such but only transgressed as if it was a completely transparent and neutral passage
rather than a specific space of its own.
It is almost the same with media use: sometimes people using media are acutely
aware of these communicative tools, at other moments their use is so routinized that