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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 130

8. LAYERS OF TIME

Media are primarily tools for communicating across time and space. Media practices
are structured along temporal and spatial orders, but they also structure time as well
as space, making them into meaningfully ordered sociocultural coordinates of human
experience. Let us begin with time, investigating both several kinds of temporal
frames to media use and the modes in which it creates and recreates temporalities.
First, media use is always located in time, bound to time. It is organized in daily,
weekly, annual, generational and life-span cycles, slightly different for each kind of
medium – and for each individual. I read the paper for breakfast, start working at the
computer in the morning, listen to radio news at lunch, make some afternoon phone
calls, listen to a CD and watch evening television and then read a book at bedtime.
Media correlate to my daily life rhythms, and even help organize them so that I am
in phase with the surrounding world. Also, each act of media consumption takes its
definite time. Watching a poster or postcard image may take just an instant, while
reading a book, watching a movie or following a soap opera occupies a very different
time span. Media consumption acts are processual practices that cannot be reduced
to those focal acts of reception alone. They are prolonged and dispersed chains of
encounters between people and media, comprising at least four consecutive phases of
shifting length, character and location, and which might be broken off at any stage,
from selection over purchase and use to disposal. Some phases are fast and brief,
others are slow and prolonged or deferred.
Second, the processes of media consumption that form multifarious temporal
chains of acquisition and use also affect time at all levels, from present moments to
historical memories that shape identities. Media represent and recreate different
times: depict night and day, summer and winter, past and present, as virtual times.
Nostalgia is only one obvious example of this mechanism whereby mediated and
mediating texts colour and reconstruct memories, history and individual as well as
collective identities. There is no sharp limit here (as elsewhere) between reproduction
and production. Media not only represent ‘real’ time and afford it specific meanings
by reinforcing certain cultural associations. They clearly also construct and invent
time, in particular through the collaboration between media time (the temporal
processes of media use) and mediated time (temporalities represented in media texts).
One example is the way Solna Centre constructed the annual seasons mentioned in
Chapter 1. This indoor place was not strongly tied to the external seasons and
weather conditions, but could at least stretch the temporalities of the surrounding
world within its own walls, with the aid of ventilation, light, decoration, ads and
events. For instance, public communication from the centre constructed the seasons