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54 Consuming Media

relations. Because the contexts of media use are so enormously complex, there is
always a risk that the richness of a concrete situation is reduced by researchers
through a process Arjun Appadurai calls ‘metonymic freezing’, i.e. when a single
aspect of people’s lives is used to characterize or categorize them. 21 In addition,
increasing globalization has gradually extended the contexts of media use to virtually
global audiences, giving rise to glocal contexts, where global, national and local levels
merge. 22
Meaning is created in encounters between subjects, texts and contexts. This is a
dynamic process, where all understanding presupposes and is grounded in some
preconception, which at the same time is an obstacle to and resource for a fuller
understanding. Because of the interplay between preconception and understanding,
media texts are never completely decoded in a single act of reception. Media texts
always carry ‘an excess of meaning’, making it impossible to exhaust them of their
possible meanings. 23 This hermeneutic view of interpretation and reception breaks
with all notions that the meaning of a text resides in the text itself. Meaning is
produced in the contextualized encounter between the reader and the text. The
meaning that a text conveys is produced in the reading of it, framed by the intratex-
tual, intertextual and extratextual contexts of that relationship.
The intratextual context is the text as a whole, the interpretation of each specific
part of that text. The intertextual context consists of other texts that are brought to
the fore in the encounter between a recipient and a text, from the genre that a text is
inscribed in to its references to other texts, and texts that deal with the same subject
matters. These encounters between texts have no objective existence, but presuppose
the interpretive acts whereby human subjects interrelate. The extratextual context can
be divided into a text-related context (bound to the specific text) and a recipient
context (linked to the user of the text).
The text-related extratextual context in its turn opens in two directions, which
with Paul Ricoeur’s metaphors can be described as ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’ the
text. 24 When any subject encounters and interprets a text, an imaginary or virtual
textual world opens up in front of that text, through the text’s references to (and
creation of) some kind of reality. Since texts are human artefacts, there is also a world
opening up behind the text, including the intentions of the author and the historical
context in which the text was produced, with the ‘structure of feeling’ in which it was
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originally embedded. The recipient context has a series of subjective, social, cultural
and historical dimensions, from a micro to a macro level, with everyday and lifeworld
contexts in between. These fundamental dimensions may both converge and diverge,
and can be further subdivided into a number of specific contexts in terms of family,
gender, age, class or ethnicity.
This hermeneutic or cultural model of communication provides a critical perspec-
tive on the routine linear model of transmission. Harold Lasswell’s famous 1948
formula was: ‘Who / says What / to Whom / through what Channel / and with what
Effect?’ This kind of model was the basis for most media studies, which still tend to
be rather strictly divided between studies of production, of texts and of reception.