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44 Consuming Media

noting the problematic conceptual slide between chapters. Consumption is generally
understood as the acquisition of (non-media) commodities up until the last chapter,
where David Morley’s discussion of theories of consumption in media studies shifts
the focus to reception and interpretation. By breaking down the process into separate
research areas for shopping and media use, researchers have missed its interlocking
chains with phases of shifting length and localization, intrinsic to the full process of
consumption.
Until recently, consumption studies have mainly considered consumption as a
financial transaction: a product changes hands, is transferred from a producer to a
consumer for a sum of money. Today, consumption researchers have increasingly
abandoned their exclusive focus on the financial aspect and started to regard
consumption as a process that transforms the relation between a product and a
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person. As it moves out of the sphere of production, the product is transformed by
being associated with a particular individual or group. Consumption involves a
complex encounter between textual products and individual subjects in distinct social
settings or contexts leading to the creation of meaning, identity and shared life
worlds. It also thus implies production – of experiences, meaning, identity, relations,
communities, public spheres and new symbolic expressions. It includes both the
financial act in which goods and services change hands, and the practices in which
these products are then used in the creation of intersubjective experiences, individual
and collective identities, knowledge, cultural constructions of meaning and social
interaction and relations. Reception – meaning-producing interpretation – starts
already in media production, since the product-makers’ own interpretations of their
raw materials and drafts contribute to the intended form. The moment of reception
also permeates distribution; for example, the people in charge of buying products for
a store and the sellers in the store must be familiar with the products in order to make
profitable selections and presentations.
Consumption is here defined as ‘the selection, purchase, use and disposal of all
kinds of goods and services that have the form of commodities’, i.e. are for sale in
some kind of market. People gain access to objects and services in other ways too.
Besides commodities, people regularly also encounter resources in the forms of gifts
and of public goods. Specific artefacts may at any point transform from one form to
another. Public libraries lend out their books for free, but buy them on the market,
and birthday presents are also often first bought in shops. Still, these three methods
of transferring control over objects and services each follow specific rules and princi-
ples. In this book, it is the world of media commodities that dominates, but we will
also consider how it interacts with gifts as well as with public goods.
Consumption may actually be understood in either a broad or a narrow sense. In
the wide or material sense, it encompasses all acts where living beings ingest
anything, physically or mentally, thus disintegrating and integrating it with them-
selves. In this sense, a bird consumes a worm, an infant consumes her mother’s milk
and later a fairy tale, a birthday child consumes its gifts and a citizen consumes public
goods. But what is at stake here is the narrower economic sense of the word outlined