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56 Consuming Media

narratives or art works, where the experience and the interpretations that arise from
each fresh encounter with a new reader are what count.

POWER DIMENSIONS
Consumption and media use are woven into a network of power relations, from the
micro-power of everyday interactions to the macro-power of nation states and global
corporations. Consuming practices raise questions about panoptic control and self-
empowerment, ideology and resistance, where researchers alternate between
regarding consumption culture either as the core of the run-of-the-mill everyday, or
as an escape from it. Media practices, as processes of communication, include strug-
gles for power over meaning and identity in space and time. Communication and
power are always co-present, since power may be regarded as a (coercive) form of
communication, and communication as a (communicative or symbolic) form of
power. Power develops in all the kinds of spaces that have been discussed here: the
spaces of media, of shopping, and of cities. Communication media are deeply
involved in structuring time and regulating access to and use of space, and these are
key dimensions for the construction of individual and collective identities.
We will here reconstruct the basic power dimensions of modern societies and
locate media practices in these dimensions. We do this by combining theoretical
sources that are rarely integrated. In particular, we make use both of Pierre Bourdieu
and Jürgen Habermas, whose works in this respect productively supplement each
other, offering a way out of the sweeping understanding of power that otherwise
threatens to make cultural studies approaches vague or even self-contradictory. 31 By
looking for differences and complexities, and situating communicative power in a
force field of economic, political and cultural vectors, we hope to arrive at a richer
and more useful model of media power.
A process of differentiation between power systems dates back to the formation of
the modern nation state and capitalist industrialization in a long and globally differ-
entiated process, gradually emerging from the seventeenth century onwards. The
growth of media industries and institutions is a part of what Polanyi has called ‘The
Great Transformation’ of European society, making all aspects of social life dependent
on market exchange, but also separating economic power from other spheres of
power. 32 The differentiation of power spheres was refined through the twentieth-
century stratification of the bourgeoisie into economic, political and cultural strata.
In modern and late-modern societies, power cannot be reduced to one single source.
Three main types may be distinguished: economic, political and symbolic power.
These are intertwined and interdependent, but also relatively uncoupled from each
other, supported by distinct and sometimes conflicting institutional bodies.
(1) Economic power originates from work and the production of material
resources, and is institutionalized in the form of markets, companies, capital and
money. This power form structures material conditions for media use, from the
decisions made in the boards of multi-national media enterprises to the everyday use
of money in purchasing media commodities on the market. Economic power is