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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 123

used for consuming mass-produced contents but rather are intended for producing
one’s own texts and interacting with others.
All media may be used for very different purposes. First, there is the standard mass
communication pattern of making messages, reproducing them on (more or less) a
mass scale and sending them to their consumers, who then receive them and use
them according to their own circumstances. Both individual and collective actors are
involved in all phases of such transmission chains of dissemination and reception.
Individual artists as well as large media corporations produce and distribute such
messages, and they are used by single persons and families as well as by large social
institutions, including shops and whole shopping centres. John Durham Peters has
outlined the complex history of communication as a tension between dialogue and
dissemination, and different media have historically been developed with one or the
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other focus, even though all of them may be used in both ways. Transmission (the
transfer of messages from sender to receiver) is the main function involved in dissem-
ination processes of the mass media, but there are also elements of individual consul-
tation (where people look for specific information, for instance in libraries or on the
Internet). Other uses of media technologies are for surveillance and registration,
whereby individuals willingly or unwillingly supply information to central archives
of various kinds. A third set of uses includes dialogues between individuals and
groups. Such dialogues may be truly mutual and open forms of communicative
action, but they are more typically framed by unequal power relations and include
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aspects of coercion and strategic action. Each media circuit allows for many variants
and combinations of these communicative forms, and specifically in new digital
multimedia, these forms are notoriously mixed. With a wired pc, one can switch
continuously between fetching and reading prefabricated texts, writing one’s own
texts, editing images, filling in forms and interacting with others.
Thus, the dynamic sets of media circuits are intersected by equally complex types
of communication. When processes of communication and media use are seen as
processes of consumption, a further set of main types can be discerned. As was shown
in previous chapters, each phase of consumption runs at a different place and pace
for different sets of media and people. Some phases are fast, others slow; some are
located in public places, others at home. Also, the forms of consumption differ.
Media (texts as well as machines) can be bought, hired, borrowed, stolen, self-made
or received as gifts. Some media are sold as commodities, owned as private property
for the intended direct communicative use or transformed into items for collecting.
Others are supplied as common public goods, for instance as library loan or as free
public service broadcast. Yet others are transferred as interpersonal gifts. Media and
mediated texts move in and out between such consumption forms, and again many
combined forms are found, such as ‘free offers’ in shops or libraries’ annual sales of
unwanted books.
Those media commodities that are sold and used in discrete units may be called
‘simple’: books, journals and printed pictures. Other media are ‘double’ in that their
use requires a combination of software (texts) and hardware (decoding machines):

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