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26 Consuming Media

definitions of media and media use. Distinctions are finally drawn between
economic, political and symbolic power, making use of contemporary social and crit-
ical theory, in order to understand how media are embedded in multidimensional
relations of power and resistance.
The next four chapters look more closely at four media circuits found in the shop-
ping centre: texts (books, magazines and journals), pictures (photos, posters and
postcards), audiovisual media (CD, radio, television and video) and media hardware
(involved in most kinds of media, including hi-fi as well as computer media). Each
chapter focuses on what is specific for each of them but also points out intermediary,
overlapping and interlacing factors and forms, resulting from continuous dialectics of
stabilization and mobilization. These media circuits are no logical necessities but
rather provisional and localized conventions in the ways in which media circulate in
a shopping centre. They have much in common, but each of them offers privileged
insights into different aspects of media use in general. Three aspects are gradually
developed through all these chapters: (1) the spatial contexts, locations and settings of
media consumption, (2) the temporal processes of those same practices, and (3) the
intermedial relations and intersections between different media circuits. This group of
four chapters begins with the most traditional and discrete media forms and moves
toward increasingly multi-modal media with the aim of providing an overview of the
increasing complexity of media consumption. Through the process we also encounter
the increasing difficulty of defining specific media and their circuits, thus pointing to
a central characteristic of contemporary media.
Chapter 3, ‘Print Media’, deals with books, newspapers and magazines, which
are found in bookstores, press shops and the local library. This media group actu-
alizes issues of how place-bound identities are shaped by reading magazines and
newspapers, and how social bonds are created by owning and giving away books.
Chapter 4, ‘Media Images’, is devoted to the photographic goods, posters and cards
that are sold and used in the shopping centre. It investigates the generic categories
people develop in their use of these image forms, their relationship to mass-media
images, and the ways these image practices are used to document and express
personal history, identity and social relations. Chapter 5, ‘Sound and Motion’,
studies the sale and use of films, videos, records and digital disks. The spatial and
social settings of the media shops are depicted, but also how these media forms
come to play in a broader range of activities, including musical performance and
the functions and forms of collecting. Chapter 6, ‘Hardware Machines’, takes its
point of departure in the machines that are a necessary component in the
consumption of certain media texts: television sets, hi-fi equipment, cameras,
cellular phones and computers. An analysis of these media machines and their
place in media consumption leads to a consideration of issues of access, power over
space and time, and cultural citizenship.
Following this overview, the specific media circuits are again combined in order to
analyse the overarching networks of the media world at large. Chapter 7, ‘Intermedial
Crossings’, summarizes overarching aspects and dimensions of media consumption,