Page 64 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 51

content, it becomes more complicated to uphold stable distinctions between different
media circuits.
But technology, commerce, consumption and use do not move at the same pace
in this fusion process. The third generation of mobile phones makes possible an
extremely interactive audio-visual media circuit that combines sounds, texts and
pictures, whereas the formats of videos and DVDs still make up a distinct media
circuit in terms of circulation, consumption and use. Media circuits are today (and
have in a sense always been) in a transitional state of unsimultaneous simultaneity.
‘Old’ and ‘new’ media circuits coexist and are embedded in each other, at the same
time as they balance between ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’ in time and space. There are
always new techniques that have ‘not yet’ been introduced in fully on the media
market, while others (like vinyl records today) are at the point of ‘no longer’ being
produced and are vanishing, but still continue to subsist on the fringes of the market.
The ongoing merging of communication technologies makes demarcations
between media circuits arbitrary and raises a need for new media concepts. Instead
of coining a brand-new and perfect definition, we use the term ‘media’ for technolo-
gies for communication, including those combinations of material artefacts, practices
and social institutions primarily intended for producing and sharing meaning.
Further, we choose not to divide media beforehand into strict types and kinds. Lots
of differentiations may be made between media forms, depending on the perspective
and purpose. Amateurs tend to manage with fewer categories than experts;
producers, distributors and consumers group media differently; and categories shift
between social settings. The ways in which media are defined and divided into media
circuits (press, television, telephones etc.) are thus socially anchored and historically
dynamic. There are institutionally supported stabilizing mechanisms whereby state
authorities or large commercial actors strive to fix these categories in order to control
and manage media use. But in a parallel movement, various actors always mobilize
these boundaries around and within the media world. How these boundaries are
drawn needs to be studied socially and historically.
This broad and multilayered view of media enables us to overcome the problem-
atic external limitations and internal divisions of media studies, which have tradi-
tionally focused primarily on press and television. It is important to capture the
interplay involving a much wider range of communication technologies, including
records and photos, posters and postcards, books and journals, records, videos and
films, telephones and other digital hardware from television and hi-fi to computers.
All these are crucially interrelated in today’s complex media world – in the cultural
industries as well as in daily life.

MEDIA USE
Media studies have mainly investigated processes of reading, listening to and
watching media. Those kinds of media reception are central among the uses people
make of media, since it is these practices that define media as a particular set of
phenomena, intended for communication. However, there are also other uses of the

Consumption and Communication 51