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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 131

in such a way that winter hardly existed at all, while instead Christmas was treated as
one long season of its own, from mid-October to early February. 1

HISTORICIZING TIME
Definitions of space and time are always interdependent in social life, as is reflected
in the modern notion of ‘time zones’ which divide the common world time – created
by the agreement to impose Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 – into spatially separated
local times. But as contemporary conceptions of digital real time – or ‘timeless time’,
as Castells designates it – testifies to, even the spatial borders between these time
zones are easily transgressed by the time–space comprehension of contemporary
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media. From such a perspective, time is literally nullified and becomes more and
more independent of spatial distances. However, media have always contributed to
both preserving and reducing time. Script was the first media in which time could be
stored and hence became a prevailing site of historical memory. This is still reflected
in the double meaning of the word ‘history’, referring to both the lived past and its
form of representation, from stories to historiography. As time incessantly moves, it
demands a medium to ‘preserve’ it: a technology for the storage, transmission and
processing of information. In this way media also contribute to the repetition of the
past, which becomes particularly obvious in currents like postmodernism that resur-
rect art formulas that have been considered out of date.
Our combination in this project of contemporary ethnographic fieldwork and an
historical perspective inspired by Walter Benjamin and Paul Ricoeur is an interdis-
ciplinary attempt to better understand the temporal dimensions of media use. To
Benjamin, time and history were central but also highly problematic concepts. He
did cherish ‘that anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city’ as
well as the arcane practices of collecting as ‘a form of practical memory’ by which the
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collector ‘takes up the struggle against dispersion’. But these acts of precious remem-
bering serve mainly to rescue past phenomena ‘from the catastrophe represented very
often by a certain strain in their dissemination, their “enshrinement as heritage”.
– They are saved through the exhibition of the fissure within them. – There is a tradi-
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tion that is catastrophe.’ It is the institutionalized forms of cultural heritage that crit-
ical remembering resists, and it can only be done in flashing moments. ‘The true
picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up
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at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.’ Benjamin sees
history as a fatal struggle:
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal
procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.
According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession.
They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with
cautious detachment … There is no document of civilization which is not at the
same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of
barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from

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