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interest in the geographies of communication, in line with a more general effort to
situate cultural processes. 3

Localizing media consumption in physical and social space and time makes visible
connections and distinctions that are otherwise neglected. This book explores what
can be learnt from a consistently localizing approach to media practices. It starts from
a specific site rather than from specific kinds of media or specific audiences. A shop-
ping centre offers a context for studying late-modern consumption typical in the
sense that most kinds of people and media flow through such a space. Investigating
how media are sold, bought and used by people in such a centre, a wide range of
interactions between people and media are discerned. Based on solid ethnographic
research, this book offers a unique and comprehensive presentation of late-modern
media practices in their full complexity, cutting across boundaries such as those
between production and consumption or between various kinds of media. It thus
enables a transgression of the prevailing borders that otherwise hampers a critical
understanding of how different localities, media, people and practices are intercon-
nected in a mediatized world. It highlights how people consume media, and how
media in a sense also consume people, mediating and shaping their interrelations,
actions and thoughts. It thereby indicates how deeply intertwined communication
and shopping are in everyday life of today.

PARIS 1800 – BERLIN 1900 – STOCKHOLM 2000
This approach moves not only translocally between contemporary spaces of media
consumption across the globe, but also across temporal distances. Each time-space has
links to other ones – through historical memory and through anticipatory imagina-
tion. One particularly fruitful move leaves our present location in Stockholm at the
threshold of the twenty-first century and follows the German cultural critic Walter
Benjamin (1892–1940) back to early twentieth century Berlin, continuing in his
company back to the Paris of the early and mid nineteenth century. Benjamin’s work
offers an historical backdrop as well as a methodological influence. His unfinished
Passagen-Werk, written in the 1930s, posthumously published in German in 1982 and
in English in 1999 as The Arcades Project, was an admirable effort to depict the fluidity
and incongruence of the modern world by studying all the people and commodities
that flowed through the commercial urban spaces of the nineteenth-century Paris
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shopping galleries. As a critical historical materialist on the fringe of the dissident
early Frankfurt school, with both Jewish and Marxist philosophical affinities,
Benjamin developed ideas about modern mediatized society that still remain valid and
useful. There are innovative traits to be taken up from his specific analyses of modern
times and media, from his consciously ambiguous position combining sensual fasci-
nation and sharp critique, and from his labyrinthine, winding and multifarious
writing style, creating a montage of voices from theoretical as well as popular sources.
Passages of consumption transgress times as well as space. Our study juxtaposes early,
high and late modernity, as well as the European locations of Paris, Berlin and

Locating Media Practices 3