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of interactive communication techniques. New, digital media networks and an
intensified intermedial complexity require new critical and interpretive approaches.
These considerations have consequences for issues of media power and resistance,
since access to – and influence on – all these various media circuits is the most
central way to get a chance to make use of symbolic and communicative power.
Cultural citizenship needs to ensure communicative rights related to the widest
range of media: software and hardware both for consumption and for production,
and in all possible genres and forms of communication.

(2) The temporal chains of consumption are stretched out in time and often intersect
with other ways of communicating, for instance through gifts, loans, or the free or
subsidized use of public utilities. Looking at the full process of communication makes
it possible to combine insights from consumption studies and media studies, and to
understand how media power is played out in all phases of the encounter between
people and media. Issues of access relate to the acquisition of communicative resources,
including the organization of supply on media markets. Issues of use concern social and
legal rules for communicating, from censorship to ‘netiquette’ (the etiquette or norms
of social behaviour that have developed around the Internet). Struggles of power and
resistance develop around all phases of consumption and production. Media use is also
deeply enmeshed in the construction of time, history and future, so that these issues
have fundamental repercussions on the basic coordinates of social life today.

(3) The spatial contexts of communication put public spaces on the agenda. Public
spheres remain linked to public spaces, and it does matter how these spaces are organ-
ized, for instance in urban centres and environments for acquiring and using media.
Here, city centres play a particular role, and their commercialization in the form of
shopping centres poses threats of limiting the scope of what interactions are allowed
and possible in those settings. There is in fact a need for a range of distinctly organ-
ized physical spaces, on a scale from intimate to open ones: private, semi-public and
public places. The shopping centre raises the issue of a right for privacy, in the face
of advanced forms of surveillance technologies that tend to intervene in the most
intimate settings. Another issue is the need for semi-public spaces for groups of
people to meet and interact on their own. The issue of public space is finally put on
the agenda by the accelerating commercial privatization of city centres. With Jürgen
Habermas, we have argued for the development of dynamic and intersecting public
spheres, and against their colonization by either system: that of the state or that of
the market. It is important to develop and defend spaces for media use of various
kinds, both as commodities and as public utilities, and both for consumption and for
production. All these spatial issues are clearly relevant to issues of cultural citizenship
and communicative rights. Again, media use is central to basic human constructions
of spatiality, as people use them to orientate themselves, to identify situated localities,
to emulate virtual spaces for interaction, and to develop transient mobilities that
enables lines of escape as well as forges links to distant others.