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148 Consuming Media

far-reaching radiation networks, radio, television, records, telephones and computers
were all strictly bound to fixed and mostly indoor stations, and there are still geographic
or climatic conditions where they normally do not work. On the other hand, there are
functional and social limitations as well. It is hard to watch films on the dance floor or
the football arena – at least for the dancers and players in question. It is considered
impolite to let your cellphone ring while attending a lecture or making love. Likewise,
when media can be (and are) used, the place of use interferes with that use, affecting
the interpretations made. The place of reading, listening or viewing is not neutral to the
meaning or pleasure that media texts offer. Having read a text at home, at school, in
the subway or while on vacation makes a difference to how it is experienced and under-
stood – even when such links are not consciously remembered.

(2) Second, media represent places and spaces, and afford them meaning. In our
project, we found many examples of mediated ‘place identities’ – media texts repre-
senting a location and associating it with historical, cultural and social meanings. In
fact, no place or space can ever be thought or experienced in a pure way, without such
symbolic meanings attached. We may try to experience a building or a street in a raw,
physical and ‘meaning-less’ manner, but we are doomed to culture, bound to always
make interpretations and to pull everything into meaning-making, so that our ex-
periences will always immediately be coloured by signifying associations. The shop-
ping centre itself was in one respect a nontextual structure of cement and glass,
framing material movements of things and organisms, but it was always also more or
less consciously understood and experienced as a kind of text – read by management
and visitors alike to mean different things. And this faculty of making meaning was
actively played out in its architecture and design. In the other direction, all media
texts repeatedly refer to spatial forms and symbolically reconstruct them as virtual
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spaces. The spaces narrated, depicted or implicitly referred to in computer games,
posters or film music interact with the spaces in which these media are used. This
interaction is sometimes rather arbitrary, but at other times deliberately planned and
utilized in order to modify spatial identification. The shopping centre used web
pages, ads, signposts, placards and mural paintings to remind people of historical
events that located the centre as a unique place and invested it with intentionally
positive meanings, in order to attract visitors and entice them to become consumers.
Solna Centre identified itself by referring to Solna’s popular soccer team AIK and to
its history as the cradle of Swedish film production. Such references in and around
the centre marked out its identity and distinguished it from competing centres. Some
visitors were attracted to that local identity, identifying with the place and its history,
while others might reject it, for instance if they favoured a rival team.

(3) Third, media uses create social spaces. Mobile phones form ‘talk spaces’ that inter-
sect geographical space: bind physically distant places together while inscribing a
circle around the talking individual, separating him or her from the surroundings and
those who cannot hear the distant voice or participate in the dialogue. People reading