Page 58 - Consuming Media

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above, including a direct transfer of money in a market. Such consumption acts link
people and objects with each other, while transforming them between a series of
roles.
Each act of consumption can be said to pass through four phases: (1) selection, (2)
purchase, (3) use and (4) disposal. These phases are interconnected. For example,
there are no purchases without a minimal element of selection. Use presumes that
something has been purchased (if the product is not stolen). The disposal of the
product also presumes preceding instances of selection and purchase. Each phase can
be studied separately, but also as parts of a whole since the shifting character of each
phase together produces different consumption processes. This study deals mainly
with individual acts of consumption where private consumers buy or use media prod-
ucts. But we also look at cases where selection, purchase, use and/or disposal of the
product are carried out by a collective social institution such as a company (including
the shopping centre itself or one of its shops), an organization or the state.
Consumption is intrinsically a social process, founded on specifically organized rela-
tions between people, where some sell things that others buy from them. Different
acts interlock, so that one act is added onto another when for instance a shop owner
first buys goods from the distributor and then sells them to customers, restricting his
own use of them to offering them for sale in his shop. The whole societal process of
consumption is composed of innumerable such acts of shifting character, through
which the members of a society are linked into commercial networks. In this narrow
sense, a consumption act must always include the defining purchase phase. But there
is also an intermediary sense of consumption, where all usage of objects that have
once been commodities might also be included. For example, reading a book received
as a gift can be said to be part of a larger consumption process, even though it was
the giver who bought the book (and probably didn’t read it). This means that
although commodities, gifts and public goods involve separate logics for transferring
objects between people, these three kinds of circuits frequently interlock, with
commodities and thus consumption as a dominant form in capitalist societies. In this
manner singular consumption acts are woven into complex chains of consumption,
in which consuming acts in the narrow and primary sense are often combined with
acts that are consumption in the intermediary sense, as gift acts and use of public
goods that have once been commodities.
What happens when we think of media consumption in these four phases? The
nature of the selection may vary, but normally it includes both a survey of the prod-
ucts being offered and a decision. When purchasing a durable product such as a tele-
vision set, for example, a consumer may make a close examination of the market from
his or her desk at home, comparing different tests and prices. After careful consider-
ation a consumer may select a book from a book club catalogue that he or she has
received in the mail, and place the order from home. On the other hand the selec-
tion may be based on a quick look around in the shop. When it comes to cable tele-
vision, the selection might be made at the spur of the moment when flicking between
channels, or well in advance by studying a television guide. Already in the selection,

Consumption and Communication 45