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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 49

published on the Internet still a newspaper? Is e-mail a form of mail? Is an e-book
still a book in a conventional sense? Such questions are raised in the form of copy-
right problems, unclear boundaries between the private and public spheres, and as
new conditions for forming public opinion. There is then a practical need to modify
established and conventional uses of the concept of media. In the case of digital tech-
nologies, it is caused by material changes, but the relationship between technologies
and institutions should be understood as dialectical in the sense that they are mutu-
ally dependent and affect one another. Sometimes technological innovations lead to
institutional changes, but in other cases new institutional conditions can make room
for new technological applications. 6
In the Passages project, we asked people who visited the shopping centre how they
defined media. We received highly diverse answers, ranging from those identifying
media with people or with copper wire, to those who mentioned posters, books, tele-
phones, home pages, CDs, or the more conventional press, radio and television. No
absolute definitions can be given that once and for all establish what a medium might
be. New technologies and new social institutions for symbolic communication
continually arise, modifying its material base. 7
Whatever concept of media is used, there is further an abundance of ways to divide
the world of media into different media forms. Such boundaries are often legitimated
by references to fixed physical, physiological or functional properties. For instance,
media primarily intended to transmit meaningful messages across geographical space
often have names starting with ‘tele-’, as in ‘telephone’ and ‘television’, while media
for storing information across time have been given names ending in ‘-graph’ and
‘-gram’, as in ‘lithograph’, ‘photograph’ or ‘phonograph’. This is not a rigid distinc-
tion, for as the word ‘telegraph’ shows, the two functions are typically combined. A
book, photo or record stores words, images and sounds for future generations, but
can also be used to transfer them from one place to another. There are similar prob-
lems with divisions based on which human senses are targeted, since many so-called
visual media also have tactile components, while CDs are also material objects and,
together with their covers, contain visual information. In fact, all media and symbolic
forms of expression are actually multimodal, as there are inherent pictorial aspects of
the alphabet and the printed page, visual gestures in music performances, and so on. 8
Another important distinction is between hardware (machines, appliances or tools of
communication) and software (texts and programs of various kinds). We will discuss
this further in Chapter 6, but it can already be noted that even though hardware and
software as commodities tend to be produced and circulated in different ways, they
are normally consumed in combination, which makes this division less suitable for a
general mapping of types of media use. For instance, while cameras and photos are
made and sold in distinct ways, in their actual use, the one presupposes the other.
Other divisions instead take their point of departure in the historically specific
ways in which social institutions and technological systems organize communication.
It is in this spirit that we here distinguish between media circuits as loose, flexible but
tenacious groupings of media into rough categories that need not be very consistent

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