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and used together in bookshops, libraries, and so on. An expanded media concept
shows how media circuits are kept apart but also interconnected in communicative
practices of various kinds. By not taking received media types for granted, it is possible
to see those mechanisms through which media circuits are produced as separate, and
then again intermedially combined at all stages and levels, from production to use and
from single texts to whole industrial branches.
Cultural studies explore the borderlands of culture and cultural research: between
disciplines, universities, countries – and aesthetic fields. Culture and media are
increasingly interrelated in late-modern societies, due to mixed processes of cultural-
ization, mediatization and digitalization. These processes also blur established
boundaries between media types, creating new and hybrid forms of communication
and cultural genres. In particular, digital media technologies have pushed forward
trends of convergence between industries, between genres and between forms of
media use and cultural practice. In response to such developments, and parallel to the
spread of the concept of intertextuality, concepts like multimedia, hypermedia,
multimodality and intermediality have triggered new forms of cultural and media
research that crosses inherited disciplinary and generic borders. Both culture and
cultural studies thus increasingly move between media.

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