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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 113

Similar kinds of hardware were also used in the centre by its visitors. Phones could
for instance function as tools for selecting or purchasing other media commodities,
like when customers call their partners from the video rental shop in order to decide
which film to hire for the night.
A mixed case was machines owned by commercial establishments but used by
customers and visitors. Phone booths were sparsely placed at strategic places in the
centre. The library had computer terminals too, both for staff and for visitors. They
could be used as a means of registering loans or library cards, or for information
access in archives or on the Web, or for other kinds of communication. This is an
example of one medium (computers) in the service of others (books, journals, and so
on). The library also had equipment for listening to CDs and looking at microfilm
etc., comfortably located for public access but ultimately controlled by the staff
according to laws and rules of conduct. Visitors trying to access or create porno-
graphic or Nazi websites on the library terminals could count on being thrown out,
if they were discovered.
ATMs and computer terminals of various kinds were found in post offices, banks
and at cash desks, used for carrying out money transfers and accessing related finan-
cial information. Here, particular kinds of money-transfer media produced symbolic
communication acts (transfer of numeric signs) that were truly performative, having
direct real and material effects in the form of economic values shifting place or
owners. To our knowledge, no media studies seem to acknowledge ATM machines as
media, as their use is so clearly restricted to one specific purpose. Still, they do
mediate symbolic messages, and their existence underlines the principal difficulty of
defining what is a medium and how do delimit media circuits, as discussed in
Chapter 2.
One interesting case was the use of strategically located monitors and loudspeakers
to provide information, modify the atmosphere of the place or advertise specific
products. In the centre, nearly a hundred monitors were displayed that were not for
sale. One third of these stood turned on in hi-fi shops, as part of the interior design. 8
The rest were placed in the windows of other shops, by entrances and inside shops,
with the purpose of supervising or steering visitors’ movements, decorate the visual
space, supply information or entertainment for children and adults, and/or advertise
commodities for sale by showing fiction, sports, music, documentary images, textual
material and pure commercials. Many were found in food and hardware stores, but
some were also placed in media shops that did not sell television sets and thus exem-
plified intermedial cooperation.
There was a small cinema in the centre, called Sagittarius (Skytten). Its film
projector was an example of a tehnological fixture around which was built a whole
room for cultural experiences. This was one of two dozen similar suburban and shop-
ping centre cinemas around Sweden, managed by the Eurostar company. This little
cinema, squeezed into an awkward intermediate space near one of the bookshops,
was not well integrated into the centre and led an obscure life. The centre would have
liked to establish a large multiplex cinema within its confines, in line with the

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