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124 Consuming Media

radio, television, records, videos, telephones and computers. Sales may be organized
by the piece (books) or through some kind of subscription (journals, television).
Among double media, the software units may be packaged as things (materially sepa-
rable units, like tapes or records) or as flows (as with broadcast media). Some such
differentiations between single/double, piecemeal/subscription and thing/flow media
are relatively fixed across time and space, but there is rarely a purely physical and thus
universal determination here. The consumption forms of different media are always
the result of historical processes where technical, economic, social and cultural factors
combine. They may also be variable between countries and between instances.
Intricate social conventions regulate how media circulate as various kinds of
commodities, common goods, loans, private gifts and self-produced use values. All
these variants can be further explored and systematized only with careful attention to
the temporal processes of intersecting acts of consumption. Their significance is lost
or misrepresented when consumption research is reduced to studies of shopping, and
when media reception research focuses exclusively on how media texts are interpreted.
Media use is a process that involves multiple triads of people relating to other
people and confronting interconnected symbolic artefacts in multifarious spatial and
social settings. Mediated culture is composed of such signifying composites of
subjects, texts and contexts that produce identities, meanings and power structures.
The complexity of such processes is multiplied by the fact that they are never
confined to one single individual, artefact and context, but instead take place in an
ongoing temporal flow of intersecting triangles, where intersubjectivity, intertextu-
ality and intercontextuality are always present within the signifying act.
It is common to identify communication as a linear chain sender text
receiver, based on a straightforward dichotomy of production and reception. To some
extent, this fits commercial commodity production, but cultural practices in general
are better analysed as plural hermeneutical triads of subjects–texts–contexts. It is the
commodity form that institutionally and experientially separates production from
reception. However, such chains of transmission are always integrated into more
complex interactions between consuming users, mediators and producers. All these
actors move in and out of each of various positions that are often but not always insti-
tutionally separated into different times and spaces. From a subject-centred perspec-
tive, people move through spaces (contexts) and encounter and use media (texts).
Interpretations start by differentiating texts out of contexts – perceiving them as texts
in the first place, out of the more or less chaotic flow of things and signs – and then
relating them again to each other in acts of interpretation. From a context-centred
perspective, it is subjects and texts that move as floating objects inside spaces. And
from a text-centred perspective, texts move between subjects in contexts in chains of
transmission.

INTERLACED MEDIA CIRCUITS
An expanded media concept makes visible how media circuits are both kept apart
and interconnected in intertextual, intersubjective and intercontextual practices.