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relatively rare occasions. Statistics thus demand careful qualitative interpretation in
order to disclose any facets of when, where and how various media are actually used.
The answer to the question of to what purpose people use different media might
seem obvious since almost all media that are produced as commodities have an
intended or limited area of use. This area is, however, more distinct for some media
than for others and can be extended as different media are combined. In addition,
digital multimedia are open to a number of areas of use, such as e-mail, information
searches, computer games, music making, image editing, and so on. The use of one
and the same medium may vary significantly regarding what it is used for. For
example, one person might use a television set for watching broadcast television
programmes, while someone else is editing or watching videos he has made himself.
The line between consumption and production is often problematic when it comes
to media use. In Marx’s terms, production is simultaneously also consumption, and
consumption simultaneously also production. 16 Through the consuming use of
media, people produce symbolic forms and contents in the form of photographs,
videos, e-mail or audio recordings of their own musical performances. Conversely,
the production of programmes by media companies requires consuming a wide range
of media, including the communicative technologies of recorders, microphones,
cameras, and so on.
The use of media is thus both material and symbolic production. Every instance
of media use, whether it results in media texts or not, has productive phases, since
the reception process always leads to a production of meaning. The meaning of a
mediated message does not lie fixed and ready in the message itself, but is created
when someone interprets it. 17
Interpretation is accomplished according to taste, habit and competence in reading
genres (media literacy). People develop tendencies to use media at specific times and
places and to embed them in different types of social activities and relations, thereby
contributing to the production of the context of which their media reception is an
integral part. The production of context is not a sovereign process, but involves nego-
tiating prevailing divisions of time and space in contemporary society, social power
structures, and frames set by media technologies and institutions. Moreover, it is tied
to conventions. In her study of women who read romantic novels, Janice Radway
captured the situation of negotiation that the creation of such a context assumes
when she described the act of romance reading as an ambivalent and conflicted occu-
pation, but an act that the women themselves experience as a way of escaping the
everyday chores and the rest of the family: ‘This is my time, my space. Now leave me
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alone.’ In a similar way, by analysing ‘the how of television watching’, David Morley
demonstrated how the ‘domestic context’ of television viewing is the result of a
process of negotiation that depends on the power relations that prevail in a family. 19
These two specific instances of media reception take place in a larger context. In
Morley’s words, the ‘micro-contexts of consumption’ are linked to ‘macro-structural
processes’. 20 For example, the family relations that determine the organization of
television viewing depend on social contexts that include class, gender and ethnic

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