Page 80 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 67

have had no connection with the other products on sale. Their function – especially
the newspapers – is as a kind of loss leader, luring customers into the store where they
will hopefully buy something more profitable. Books, on the other hand, have links
to their new company. Among other things, the growing media supply has to do with
the fact that more and more media are connected to one and the same phenomenon
or story. For example, a story first published as a novel may become an audio book
or a computer game, but also an animated cartoon or a feature film, which in turn
might provide images for the cover of binders, pen cases and letterheads. The book-
shop is in fact an excellent example of a commercial place where intermedial relations
and intersections between different media circuits can be studied.
In the shopping centre there are thus two kinds of book spaces, both traditionally
viewed as temples of bourgeois culture, as opposed to the traditionally more popular
aspects of the places where newspapers are sold. But today bookshops can be said to
have become more democratic, partly through their location in shopping centres and
malls, but also because of their broader offer and sales strategies, which are no longer
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exclusively aimed at the educated classes. A similar development can also be
observed in public libraries. The traditional image of libraries is as strongholds of
highbrow culture, where learned men (and a few women) sit silently leafing through
half-bound volumes among dark, wainscoted bookcases. This image does not corre-
spond well to today’s public libraries, which in the last few decades have been ‘popu-
larized’ in the same way as bookshops, and they are nowadays both depending on a
large group of female readers. Libraries, like bookshops, have also even come to be
located in shopping centres, side by side with tobacconists. 5
Traditionally, studies of media reception have been confined to media use under-
stood in terms of reception: the reading, watching or listening to media. This runs
the risk of forgetting other media uses that are important in everyday life, such as
giving away media as presents. Media consumption, when treated as synonymous
with studies of media reception, runs the risk of neglecting the function of media as
commodities that is crucial to understanding the place of media in everyday life. This
requires a reformulation of consumption as the purchase of products into a defini-
tion of consumption as the stretched-out process discussed in the last chapter. Here,
we analyse the selection, purchase, use and disposal of books, newspapers and maga-
zines in commercial and non-commercial spaces. This approach also indicates the
importance of the places where media are used, illustrated by the contrasting roles of
the bookshop and the library.

BOOKS, NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES
Several criteria have traditionally been employed to divide media into main types.
Some of the divisions seize upon the form of expression that dominates each medium.
In this respect one can say that text and picture are central in the circuit print media.
Other divisions focus on the ability of different media to store information over time
or to distribute information in space. Newspapers, magazines and books can be stored
over time, but the duration of the storage is limited by the durability of the paper. On

Print Media 67