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48 Consuming Media

people would be prepared to accept that pen and paper are, and everyone would
probably understand the press, radio and television as forms of media. What is
counted as media varies, depending on whether material, technological or social
aspects are emphasized. This enables a distinction among three main perspectives on
media. (1) In a material sense, media are defined as sets of physical objects used for
symbolic communication, including stone, wood, paper, copper, bodily organs,
smoke, sound waves, light waves and electromagnetism. (2) From a technological
perspective, media can be described as specific tools, appliances and machines that
mediate symbolic forms and content, including oil paint, Morse code, typewriters,
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musical instruments, radio sets and computers. (3) From a social or institutional
perspective, finally, media are sets of genres, norms, regulations, professions and prac-
tices for symbolic communication, including the press, postal services, telecommu-
nications, television broadcasting and the Internet. These three perspectives highlight
different aspects of the concept of media and tend to let different but overlapping
phenomena come to mind. Take radio for instance. It can be defined as a material
medium of radio waves, as a technological medium of transmitting and receiving
machines, and as a socially organized medium of central broadcast corporations,
programme formats and dispersed listeners.
In practice, all three aspects are always interwoven. Communication technologies
integrate material structures and are woven into institutionalized social practices.
None of these perspectives alone suffices to form the basis of a clear-cut definition of
media, or a univocal differentiation between media types. Moreover, none of them
covers precisely the most common notions of media. For example, from all three
perspectives money could be defined as a medium, but would hardly be regarded as
such by most people. To start with, the use of money is clearly a form of symbolic
communication, since like other symbols money has a meaning (to work as a means
of barter with variable value) that is always tied to some form of materiality (gold,
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coins, bank notes, cheques, credit cards, etc.). Money is a symbolic element in a
monetary technology, where its value can be transferred between people with the help
of different ‘media’ such as coins, credit cards, ATMs and computers that digitally
register financial transactions, and finally as a social institution with fixed norms,
laws, regulations, practices and institutions such as banks and markets. Still, most
people do not regard money as media, but interpret it as belonging to the economic
sphere (primarily co-ordinating the allocation of material resources), which is under-
stood as differentiated from that of culture (primarily communicating meaning).
Asking, ‘What is a medium?’ can easily be perceived as mere academic hair-split-
ting, lacking any relevance for everyday reality and the social conditions of real
people. For example, people hardly have an urgent need of a media definition in
order to use their radio or television sets, CD players or computers. But today’s rapid
development of media technologies contributes to new ways of transferring symbolic
forms and contents, breaking down conventionally accepted boundaries and distinc-
tions between different kinds of media. As a consequence of this breakdown,
common-sense views of media tend to dissolve. For example, is a newspaper that is