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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 42

2. CONSUMPTION AND COMMUNICATION

Throughout history, mass consumption and mass media have been intimately inter-
connected – in practice as well as in cultural discourses. For more than a century,
print, audio-visual and visual media have depended economically on advertising,
while business and industry have needed media to reach their customers. But the
media are themselves also marketed products; consumers select, buy, use and even-
tually dispose of their newspapers, magazines, books, videos, television sets, phono-
grams, etc. Media circulate primarily as commodities. Acts of communication are
therefore typically formed as acts of consumption and embedded in market systems.
This does not mean that ‘media’ can be reduced to specific technologies sold on a
market. Consumption and communication are two different phenomena, but they
overlap considerably in modern capitalist societies. Consumption is that specific kind
of interaction whereby people exchange money for goods in an act of purchase, and
then use these acquired goods. Communication is based on intersubjective acts of
interpretation whereby people make meaning out of shared textual artefacts – be they
transient, such as conversation or gestures, or relatively fixed, like books or houses.
Consumption and communication are densely interwoven, but the balance between
commerce and culture is far from harmonious. The use of space and time for
combining these two overlapping processes gives rise to various power struggles. The
shopping centre and the processes of media consumption share a borderland char-
acter by linking commerce to culture and consumption to communication in highly
ambiguous and contested ways.
Though one obviously may consume things other than communication media,
consumption is increasingly mediatized in two main ways. First, media commodities
occupy a growing share of total consumption. Second, they are more frequently being
used as tools in an expanding range of consuming practices – from mail order and
telephone sales to Internet-based e-commerce. At the same time, the media are
increasingly commercialized, in that communication more and more is shaped
according to the forms of consumption in late modernity, characterized by the
buying and selling of market commodities. Some forms of communication still
remain outside the commodity sphere. Greeting a neighbour does not necessitate the
purchase or sale of anything and is therefore hard to analyse as a kind of commodity
consumption. But a growing number of communicative processes are drawn into
that personal sphere, as media products sold as commodities are integrated into an
endless number of contexts, and as ads and shopping-oriented activities occupy more
and more of the time and space of everyday media use. This process is mirrored in
an ongoing intimization of the media sphere at large.