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4 Consuming Media

Stockholm. Such double movements highlight historical and spatial specificities, but also
establish continuities across chronological sequences or geographical maps. It is not only
cultural analysts who choose to juxtapose times and spaces in order better to understand
their differences. Urban shopping spaces themselves also make such juxtapositions, not
least by using media of communication to construct memories and interactions through
superimposing distant and past images onto the local and the present. Media assist other
human artefacts in preserving and reworking the past within the present, and they also
aid other transportation technologies in overcoming physical distance. Media are
cultural tools that compress, juxtapose and define time and space. Media texts and tech-
nologies are integral to the production of experiences, of memories and of dream images
– and thus of the identities of individuals, collectivities and sites.
Media play key roles in Benjamin’s texts. One influential example is his idea that
mass reproduction eroded the quasi-sacred ‘aura’ of art – the unique sense of presence
in time and space that was profaned by print, posters, photographs and phonographs. 5
But his phenomenological analyses of everyday life were also filled with references to
advertising images and texts that in papers and signs expressed the fantasies and
dreams of consuming collectives, and to the practices of people who encounter and
use a large range of media, as collectors, flâneurs or ordinary city dwellers, consumers
and citizens. His interest in arcade ‘passages’ was not arbitrary. They offered a chance
to study the fleeting transitions and contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences
inherent in modern urban life, where the dichotomies of house/street, inside/outside,
private/public, commerce/culture and consumption/communication were repeatedly
deconstructed and reconstituted. His writings are exemplary in their understanding of
media culture in terms of dynamic processes, flows, transitions and mediations rather
than in stiff and static categories. These passages run through urban spaces as well as
temporal phases, indicating a non-linear historical dimension where dream-like
utopias and nostalgic memories intersect with the fleeting present, resulting in the
unstable uncontemporaneities that define modernity itself.
Benjamin used historic inquiry to search for hidden tendencies beneath the surface
of official culture. Like an archaeologist or genealogist, he traced the criss-crossing
roots of contemporary phenomena, but also looked for repressed memories of past
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brutalities and forgotten dreams of a better life. In The Arcades Project, Paris after
1800 was the frame within which he placed an exuberant series of fragments trying
to come to grips with how modern life was formed in urban constructions and media
texts of all kinds. The classical arcades were arched passages, covered walks lined with
shops. The winding, arched passageway is frequently used as a metaphor for indi-
vidual processes of communication and consumption, and in the contemporary
media world, such arcs are woven together into extremely intricate paths along which
people and media move and interact.
The past lives on in the present, in surviving traces, documents and monuments
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that are continually engaged in collective and individual identity constructions. The
future resides in the past and present, in those moments of anticipation where people
dream of new worlds. Many such dreams remain imaginary; others are transformed