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128 Consuming Media

distinguish between them and identify the narrative and its character as either of a
literary or a cinematic kind.
Media convergence and media lifts imply an intensified transfer and cooperation
between media. When such cooperation is more or less permanently institutional-
ized, new ‘multimedia’ arise out of a symbiosis of previously separate media. These
multimedia are not new, and neither is the discussion around them. Media have
always tended to interact and fuse. Since borders between media circuits are flexible
and diffuse, all talk of intermediality is necessarily provisional and spatio-temporally
situated. New media are often first perceived and used as hybrid combinations of
their predecessors, until the new forms have gained independent status. And all such
relations can either be general and typical for whole media groups or genres, or be
particular characteristics of individually staged media encounters. The connection
between television and video is, for instance, a much more general rule than a specific
quotation of a poem in a particular computer game.
On the other hand and at other points in history, one particular medium tends to
be differentiated into subsets that may develop into their own full-blown media
circuits. The networked computer was first often conceived as one single new
medium, whereas nowadays it is increasingly common to conceptualize it as
comprising a set of different media, including websites, e-mail, digital games, etc.
The historical patterns of transference from one medium to another are often in prac-
tice very complex, in that different media influence each other in partial, generically
and regionally specific ways at different points of time, so that new media remediate
a whole set of older ones, rather than just imitate one particular predecessor. 10
Through historical processes, symbolic modes are articulated with technologies,
industries, genres and uses. The connection between printing presses, publishing
houses, novels and reading has thus been so institutionalized that it is often perceived
as natural and eternal, but it is upheld by a social and material suppression of other
combinations that might in principle have created a different kind of media circuitry.
There are practices that differentiate between media circuits and construct them as
separate. Such practices of separation counteract other practices of intermediation.
Intermediality does not necessarily imply fusion and erasure of borders. Cooperation
and transferences may well preserve differences. For instance, distinctions between
modalities are upheld in multimedia like film and television through trades union
and other institutional forces, and also in digital media and the www, where music,
images and texts are carefully kept apart in technical solutions, in spite of their shared
reliance on zeros and ones. Schools and universities are one such separating institu-
tional force.

BETWEEN MEDIA
Media circuits thus intersect and interact. Each medium is in itself intrinsically mixed,
incorporating elements of others. Media also work closely together in all production
and consumption phases, including shopping and use, as well as in their textual
formats (CD covers including lyrics and photos, etc.). And they are distributed, sold