Introduction

The making of media has historically moved through a number of distinct phases, each of which can be related to the forms of production and reproduction of communication in society. From the earliest forms of writing, through typographic culture in the wake of the printing press, and then electronic culture from the telegraph and onwards to the present digital era, reproduction technologies and the cultures that have been formed around them have impacted our abilities to communicate with one another, and to produce and consume media. Each phase has introduced shifts in the nature of communication and cultural production, as well as in the way cultural works have been appreciated during production and in reception.

Appreciation is arguably a form of valuation, that is, an assignment of value to an object or a practice. Media have been appreciated, or valued, for their functionality, effectivity, for their aesthetic qualities, or for their abilities to produce economic wealth. We can think of these valuation practices as a basic motivation for engaging with media, irrespective of whether we are producing or consuming media. In fact, the relation between production and consumption has altered with the technological shift of digitalization, as the means of making media have become increasingly widespread among media users.

If mechanical reproduction introduced a change to art and cultural objects, as Walter Benjamin (1936/1977) once famously argued, the age of digital reproduction has introduced yet another shift in this relation (Bolin, 2011, p. 67). Mechanical reproduction – the printing press, photography, cinema – made exact copies of original art and media texts possible. With digital reproduction, texts not only became reproducible without loss of quality, they also became freed from their tangible carriers: the book, the printed photography, the celluloid film, the shellac record, the video tape, etc.