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effective schooling system, and there will never be one that covers all new genres and
modes of communication. Instead, the task must be to create conditions for everyone
to develop complex media literacies through participation in a diverse set of educa-
tion settings, subcultures and interpretive communities. For this, people need access
to reliable information on how to find and use different media, but there is also a
need for opportunities to develop critical reflection on the existing media world in
which everyone takes part. This can never be fully ‘delivered’ by state institutions, but
the communicative rights of cultural citizenship can strive to deconstruct the obsta-
cles that commercial businesses or oppressive social groups raise for such critical
engagement.

EXIT?
Our odyssey through the passages of media consumption, with its complex layers,
spheres and flows of communication, has indicated some of the difficulties of guar-
anteeing general access to time and space for communication in late modernity.
Uneven distribution of economic resources, leisure time and power over the use of
urban space underpin restricting inequalities in access to communication tools, texts,
public places and competencies. Since the early and high phases of modernity
analysed by Benjamin, historical developments of technologic, economic, political,
social and cultural forms have transformed the ongoing and unresolved tensions
between potentials of authoritarian oppression and exclusion on the one hand, and
of democratic empowerment and emancipation on the other. Late modernity is char-
acterized by an increasing complexity in all dimensions. 52 New media technologies
and genres, global flows of migration and travel, transformed institutional bodies on
different levels, emergent and subdivided cultural fields and intersectional crossings
of identity dimensions add up to a situation for media consumption that is difficult
to reduce to any simple theses. At this endpoint of our investigation, some conclu-
sions can be briefly summarized along the three main dimensions outlined in the
beginning and running through the whole of this book.

(1) The structural circuits of media use are open, dynamic and intersecting. There is
no strict, definite and universally valid definition or delimitation of the media
world, nor of its sub-categories. A wide range of media circuits have developed
through history, and there is no pre-given limit to what may be used or understood
as a medium. The various media are interdependent and co-articulated, as they
intersect and mix in many hybrid intermedial forms that sometimes give rise to new
circuits and at other times retain a borderland character. The existence of double
and multiple media, based on the differentiation of software and hardware analysed
in Chapters 6 and 7, has consequences for the dominant patterns of consumption
for different media circuits. There are many types of media texts and also a diversi-
fied set of media machines, and shifting ways in which these are acquired and used.
Some uses are mainly for production, others can be classified as consumption, but
these two forms of practice are often mixed in intricate ways, for instance in the use

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