Page 78 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 65

A shopping centre is one such place, central for the economic, spatial, institutional
and social processes that are typical of late modernity. It is a prismatic space of
consumption and communication, where the intersecting passages of people and
media goods result in a number of encounters: social encounters between people,
intertextual encounters between genres, and interactive encounters between
consumers and media. The next four chapters will move into such a centre, to
discover how consumption and communication are organized and intertwined in a
set of media circuits. Chapter 3 starts with the old circuits of print media, Chapter 4
continues with images of various kinds, Chapter 5 discusses temporally mobile media
of sounds and visuals in motion, and Chapter 6 approaches the hardware machines
that link other media circuits and create new, hybrid media forms. After this journey
through the late-modern mediascape, the subsequent three chapters will again bridge
the gaps and scrutinize intermedial connections, time and space. The final chapter
then returns to the dialectics of power and resistance and proposes a new agenda for
media and cultural studies.

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