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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 149

papers in a public place are likewise surrounded by a kind of invisible and silent halo
that socially prevents others from disturbing their reading. Social communicative
rules for media use sometimes change abruptly, for instance when crossing entrances
to the centre and to various stores and other spaces. The Solna Centre library was, for
example, full of little signs forbidding mobile phone talk, and the books and papers
found there could be read and borrowed but not sold, in contrast to those in the
bookshop. Places of and for media use (street, library, magazine shop, etc.) were
dialectically intertwined with places which were virtual arenas constructed through
media use and connected to distant places. Talking on a phone, looking at a photo
or reading a paper you could connect to people and events far away, for instance in
your home town if you were immigrant from a distant part of Sweden or another
continent. Certain places in the centre were like doors that opened up for such tran-
sitional and often transnational connections, and echoes from those distant places
sort of vibrated in the various media shops, through sounds, images and memories
reminding one of somewhere else.

A shopping centre is a complex kind of ‘mediascape’. A mediascape can be defined as
a configuration of media forms and texts that surround and are available to specific
people at specific times and places; just like any ‘scape’ in general is a particular set of
phenomena in a given spatial and temporal setting, analogous to how a ‘landscape’ is
a style and shape of some geographical place in space, a ‘soundscape’ is a configura-
tion of aural components in a given setting, and an ‘ethnoscape’ is made up by a
particular local mix of ethnically identified persons. 13 As such a mediascape, Solna
Centre is a fascinating crossroads of long- and short-distance connections.
Visitors relate to media while passing through the centre, using them to link to
(spatially or temporally) distant others through texts of many kinds. The manage-
ment and the businesses of the centre also use media to communicate internally, thus
unifying it into a single functional entity. This is achieved through digital webs for
telephones, radio, television, broadband and financial transactions (for instance
ATMs), but also for those stencilled notes, posters and meetings that connect the
centre management with the trade association and the individual businesses of Solna
Centre. Another linking device is the system of guards, cameras and charge cards that
registers customers and guides them towards preferred behaviours and targeted
marketing efforts. Yet another example is those ‘inscriptions and signs on the
entranceways’ that Benjamin found had ‘about them something enigmatic’. Through
their laconic and catchy formulations, store names and other insistent letterings seem
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to ‘want to say more’. Not only the items on display but also these signs are rebuses
to decipher, with a kind of poetic surplus of meaning inviting cultural interpretation
as forms of symbolic communication. Informative signs, advertising displays and
store names are interwoven into a polyphonic hypertext where intertextual dialogues
between visual landmarks create sometimes carefully planned but often also unex-
pected associations – as in the narcissistic encounter between shops like Ego and
Ecco.

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