Page 138 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 125

There are several key forms of intermediality. The Harry Potter phenomenon may be
used as an example here. At the time of our research, these popular books for chil-
dren had a marked presence in the whole shopping centre, and it was not only the
books themselves that were marketed and displayed in the bookstores. The films were
first shown in the cinema and then sold in the video store, and CDs were sold with
the film music. An informant had heard the Stockholm Philharmonics play this
music in their concerts, thus contributing to the ongoing blurring of the high/low
divide in the hierarchy of cultural commodities. Postcards and posters relating to
Harry Potter were found in the Gallerix store, and the bookstore also had pencil
boxes and notebooks with Potter imagery. Reviews and articles relating to this
phenomenon were found in papers, radio and television. Various fashion accessories
built on the popularity of Harry Potter: pockets for mobile phones, toy cameras and
phones, backpacks and sweets, children’s clothes and jewellery – all these were not
themselves as such media commodities but they were media-related commodities
that certainly testified to the unavoidable popularity of the phenomenon and were
drawn into its wide circle of use. Such a phenomenon seemed to cross all intermedial
borders, highlighting the interconnectedness of the whole media world.
The Danish book market expert Hans Hertel, among others, has found tendencies
towards a media symbiosis, suggesting that cultural circuits are increasingly closely
connected by a ‘media lift’, which transports specific works, characters, narratives and
genres up or down across various borders and hierarchies that previously seemed rela-
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tively stable. Late-modern tendencies toward media convergence are not limited to
digital media, though these form a push factor in that process. Coding in digital form
enables technical, institutional and textual fusions, creating new multimedia but also
new intermedial connections. We saw numerous kinds of interplay among media in
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the shopping centre. Some were intertextual, others extratextual, depending on
whether two textual units or two material apparatuses were related to each other. A
Harry Potter novel could tell about fateful phone calls or mention a specific film
narrative, but it could also just happen to be placed beside a Harry Potter postcard
in the bookstore window. Textual connections could in their turn relate to aspects of
either form or content, in that either stylistic design or semantic levels were activated.
Harry Potter films thus both follow similar formal storyline as the books, but also
narrate similar contents about the same characters and events; in other cases it may
be only one and not the other aspect that links two texts. A further distinction is
between those intermedialities founded on (substantial or formal) similarity and
those based on (spatial or functional) proximity between the two media. In practice,
however, real media relations are impure mixtures of these main types. For instance,
similarity often makes proximity possible – and vice versa.
The interplay between media can occur with a varying degree of intensity and
activity, from simple connection, over some kind of exchange, to a more thorough
transformation of the media involved. Another distinction may be made according
to how symmetric the relation is between the two. The multiplication of these two
dimensions results in six main types of intermediality.

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