Page 14 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 1

1. LOCATING MEDIA PRACTICES

Media transgress borders. This is their main purpose and function: to put people in
contact with someone or something that would otherwise be beyond reach in time
or space – like an image from the past or a voice from far away. Communication
implies the crossing of borders – historically across time, geographically across space,
socially between people, and culturally between texts within various symbolic forms
and genres. Media use belongs to the core of human activities in late modern soci-
eties, reconfirming that human beings are transgressing animals. For Georg Simmel,
‘the human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot
connect without separating’ and ‘the bordering creature who has no border’. 1
There is in world history, in the modern era, and most particularly in its current
late-modern phase, an accelerating growth, spread, diversification and interlacing of
communications media across the globe. Media use constitutes increasingly greater
parts of everyday life for a growing number of people around the world. This histor-
ical process of mediatization draws a widening range of activities into the sphere of
media, making mediation an inreasingly key feature of society and everyday life. All
contemporary major social and cultural issues directly implicate uses of media.
Debates on war, science, ethics, ecology, gender identities, ethnic communities,
generation gaps and socialization – all immediately raise questions of media power.
Media no longer form a distinct sector, but are fully integrated in human life. This
paradoxically means that their enormous influence can never be adequately ‘meas-
ured’, since there is no media-free zone with which to compare their effects.
The compression of time and space brought on by digital network technologies is
one aspect of this process of mediatization. Never before have so much information
and so many kinds of symbolic forms been transmitted across such great distances,
stored and preserved for future generations, and shared by so many people for such
multifarious purposes. Digitalization has also made possible an unprecedented
convergence of media branches (institutions), genres (symbolic modes) and uses
2
(practices), which blurs traditional distinctions. Media thus not only move across
time and space, but also transgress their own traditional classifications. The very
concept of media is diffuse and contested, calling for more integrated forms of inves-
tigating. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish communication media technologies
from other artefacts and to draw clear lines between main types of media. Mediation