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134 Consuming Media

time, concrete time is heterogeneous and determined by social practices, filling the
empty form of abstract time with content, at the same time as the latter directs and
frames the former.
The embodied now-time of each corporeal human being is constantly integrated
into different layers of abstract and concrete time. For instance, work is separated
from leisure in terms of time, structuring time and imposing a spatio-temporal order
onto everyday life. It is also crucial for consumption and media use, since they are
primarily regarded as leisure activities, though people do not always experience them
as such, since they often become routinized habits. 19 For instance, ‘prime-time tele-
vision’ refers to the time when most people have the best opportunity to watch TV,
but also testifies to the way they can experience their habitual media practices as a
break with the ordinary duties and routines of everyday life. ‘Prime-time’ shows how
media are both structured by and contribute to structuring people’s comprehension
of time. That structuring process is far from uniform. The uncoupling of time from
space is a salient feature of contemporary media like mobile phones, portable
computers and CD or DVD players, that allow people to be reached by mediated
contents anywhere and at any time, in a way that also makes it easy to transgress the
long-established spatio-temporal borders between work and leisure.
But media also structure time on what might be called a basic syntactical level. At
this level it is often hard to distinguish the material or technical properties of a
medium from its cultural impact. Media could roughly be categorized as either linear
or non-linear. Many forms of mediated communication rest on a linear order of time,
where some things have to precede others. Script has the same basic linear character
as speech, but at the same time opens for non-linearity, in that it is possible to go
back and forth when reading. The latter opportunity is also indirectly present in
speech, for example by referring to what has been said earlier. This shows that the
distinction between linearity and non-linearity in media communication is better
conceptualized as a question of more-or-less rather than either-or. Nevertheless, it is
quite obvious that, for example, a book has an intended beginning and an end,
whereas a photo or a painting does not. A photo does not impose an equally im-
perative syntactical time order on those who watch it as does a book on its readers.
Computer media in particular tend to mix linear and non-linear syntactical time
structures by combining different forms of symbolic communication: texts, pictures,
film, sound and music.
The linear syntactical time structure of speech and script is also reflected in narra-
tive, in terms of the episodic dimension that unfolds itself between its beginning and
its end and that one has to follow to reach its conclusion. This linear representation
of time can be inverted in the appropriation of the narrative, in the sense that it is
possible to look at it retrospectively when it has reached its conclusion and recollect
its beginning in the light of its ending, but it remains a basic structuring principle in
much human communication. Narrative is a basic human form for representing and
comprehending the past, the present and the future. Hence it is also a basic tool for
transcending the present, either backwards to the past or forward to the future, in