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2 Consuming Media

is everywhere, media technologies are today integrated into almost all other tech-
nologies and all social practices, and media forms tend to mix and blend in increas-
ingly complex ways. This pervasive presence and heterogeneous hybridity of media
invites an open investigation of how people meet and deal with all kinds of media,
and a renewed reflection on the basic ways in which communication is mediated in
the contemporary world of late modernity.
However, while communication media cross borders, they do not erase them.
Media practices are always situated in time and space. This is rarely adequately
reflected in media research. Media use is always spatially and temporally located,
while simultaneously both representing and shaping space and time. Mediated
communication both takes time and makes time, and it both takes place and makes
place. Localizing mediated communication in temporal and spatial settings makes it
possible to discern connections and distinctions that are easily forgotten. A cultural
studies perspective on media use focuses how meanings, identities and power are
produced and implied in practices that are simultaneously interactive and textual,
both localized and globalized. The acquisition and use of media are embedded in
everyday lifeworlds where people interact using multiple technologies as tools of
communication. These have essential time-space co-ordinates. Recent transforma-
tions of communication and consumption processes through mediatization, aestheti-
cization, digitalization, hybridization and globalization have necessitated new and
better ways of understanding the uses of media in everyday life, in at least three
respects.

1. First, the widening forms of mediation and their mutual interdependence due to
dense intermedial transactions necessitate a broader concept of media and a focus
on the interplay between different media circuits. Media studies need to respond
to media expansion by including a wider range of communication technologies:
traditional mass media as well as interpersonal and interactive media. And as a
response to media convergence, one must investigate numerous ways in which
different kinds of media interrelate.
2. Second, it is crucial to restore the full temporal process of consumption, through
the four main phases from selection and purchase to use and disposal. The
communicative encounters between people and media form extended and varied
processes of interlaced consumption chains, which the traditional division of
consumption and reception studies usually bifurcates. The combinatory ways in
which various kinds of media circuits are selected, bought, utilized and resold,
thrown or given away typically differ, depending on the duration, setting and char-
acter of each such phase. And these processes look different when media are
immediately consumed, hoarded and collected, loaned or used as gifts.
3. Third, processes of consumption and communication have to be contextualized in
space and time. All media are used in specific places. Until recently, media research
has tended to make the spaces of media practices invisible, depicting communica-
tion and media reception as if they happened anywhere. There is now a growing