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based on historical and conventional links, and the interests of certain media indus-
tries and media researchers. This fact makes more general studies of mediated
communication to a large extent absent in media and communication studies, rele-
gated to other disciplines and fields like sociology, ethnology, anthropology, literary
4
‘media history’ or separate departments for digital media. A more inclusive concept
of media offers a better chance to see how specific media – including those favoured
by conventional media studies – function in a wider context in a society like our own,
where all media forms in practice are closely interrelated.
It is thus only possible to make a heuristic and provisional division of communi-
cation technologies into a set of media circuits. Even though differentiations between
main types of media and key phases of communication and consumption are
constructed, context-bound and changing, such distinctions are routinely made at all
levels. Media industries and research have conventional ways to define and differen-
tiate media types. We have shown in previous chapters how these boundaries – both
the external ones around what may function as media and the internal ones between
different media – are challenged by technical, social and cultural transformations, in
particular by the intermedial flows and hybrids that have been intensified by the
development of digital and telecom technology. Still, such divisions are regularly (and
often unconsciously) made by all the actors involved, relating to shifting forms of
production, distribution and consumption. The divisions made by market actors at
the point of purchase form a particularly influential prism in the process of commu-
nication – a hub where the various actors meet and negotiate their shifting differen-
tiations, and where the interests of producers and consumers are balanced through
ongoing processes of negotiation. In these processes, there are certain stabilizing
mechanisms, tending to fix boundaries and keep media circuits apart. The distribu-
tion of media commodities on different specialized stores and their competitive divi-
sion of the market between them is one such stabilizing mechanism. But there are
also mobilizing mechanisms that tend to mix and hybridize media circuits. These will
be discussed in the next section.
Our overview started with the oldest mass media: printed books and journals, with
written words in focus, but also including graphic designs, photos and other picto-
rial forms. It continued with another classical circuit that is partly integrated in the
press but also has an existence of its own, that of photos, posters, postcards and other
printed or digital images. It is at once obvious that there is a grey zone between them,
where the balance between images and words is more even. The inclusion of images
in books and magazines, and of words in various kinds of pictures, is a mobilizing
force that blurs these borders. The separate organization of networks for selling books
and photos on the other hand tends to stabilize their distinction. The third circuit
added was a further extension to other kinds of audio-visual media, including sounds
and/or moving pictures. Again, there are many overlaps with the previous circuits,
balanced by separating forces in the sales departments of the shopping centre. Finally,
the focus on media hardware cut across the previous circuits while also pointing out
a wider set of media types such as telephones or computers that are not primarily