Page 134 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 121

they become almost invisible. This brings to mind the dialectics of hypermediacy and
immediacy mentioned in Chapter 2: the phenomenon that media technologies can
either become the reflexive focus of their users’ attention or function as transparent
2
channels for users who are completely focused on the communication content. A
related distinction is that some media use is highly conscious and focused in time and
space, while on other occasions media are almost omni-present but scattered across
the background of a wide range of social activities. The typical use of a book by
reading it is, for instance, much more focused than when reading the message of an
advertising poster in the street. There is always a certain degree of fuzziness around
all categories, including those of media use and shopping space. Still, people con-
tinuously use such categories, and so do we in our research. By not taking them as
given, but exploring how they are constructed in everyday practices, the false illusion
of their naturalness may be broken.
Communication and consumption are parallel and interrelated processes, each
comprising several phases. Consumption studies have tended to focus on purchase
rather than use, while media reception studies tend to focus on a particular facet of
use: that of reading, watching or listening. Such reception may be seen as the core
and ‘preferred’ activity of media use, but there are also other ways to make use of
media commodities where the user does not step into the symbolic universe of media
content. By acknowledging the existence of use forms other than reception, and of
other consumption phases than that of use, one may get a larger picture and under-
stand the wider contexts that are relevant to understanding how reception in the
narrow sense works. 3

TYPES OF MEDIA CONSUMPTION
The media world is internally structured, but the division lines vary between
different contexts and perspectives. Users, salespeople and producers have varying
ideas on what constitutes one particular kind of media. Instead of at the outset
fixating a definite and limited set of media, we have included all possible kinds of
media and media use that could be found within the shopping centre. The conven-
tional limitation of media studies to the press and television misses their interplay
with a wider range of communication technologies in the cultural industries as well
as in daily life. This brings up questions about what constitutes a communication
medium. Again and again, we were reminded of how vague and difficult the very
concept of ‘a medium’ is, and how divergent are people’s conceptions of media.
A close reading of classical and contemporary texts in media studies actually offers
surprisingly little clarification when it comes to a media definition. There is simply
no straightforward consensus on the extent of the concept of media. Much research
is still tied to the journalistic practices of producing information and news, while
systematically neglecting mass-produced genres like entertainment, fiction and
games, as well as interpersonal communication through phone, post or computer
networks, or interactive/productive media uses such as photography or web pages.
There is generally no real theoretical justification for this limitation, which is rather

Intermedial Crossings 121