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of what local means. The migration of people and the changes in media forms and
use increasingly point to ways that different locations, however disparate they may
be, are nevertheless linked together. Media in particular challenge the idea of culture
as place-bound. And, if culture is no longer bound to place, the study of culture must
also relinquish its tie to place as a concrete and bounded space where culture is
located. This has in turn pointed to the necessity of translocal studies of how
disparate places are related through the movements of people and their use of media
(and vice versa). 42 Tracking what Gemzöe identified as the centrifugal trajectory of
media use was from the outset a central focus of the present study. 43 Here we alter
that perspective slightly by holding place constant and examining how people use
media to connect to other locales. Although quite aware that a shopping centre is a
transitory place, populated largely by people who are only passing through, it is also
a place where people come and use media to connect them to other places. If in the
previous sections of this chapter we were looking at the production of locality, and
the limits of that production, here we focus on how translocality is produced in the
shopping centre, specifically through media consumption. We find a number of
media-specific ways people have developed to accomplish the task, in effect, of being
in two (or more) places at once.
The cellular phone is an obvious case of the way contemporary media transform
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media users’ relationship to place. Whereas a few years ago we answered the phone
and asked whom we were speaking to, today the most common question is ‘where
are you?’ In making or answering a call, or reading a phone message, the caller creates
a new space, defined by gestures and body movement, tone of voice and topic of
conversation, clearly separating the caller from his or her surroundings. Nevertheless,
the conversation becomes a public performance that others in the caller’s immediate
vicinity cannot avoid noticing, even though it is directed at someone at another loca-
tion. Kaijser interprets this complex transformation of space with the help of
Goffman’s dramaturgical model of front- and backstage aspects of performance,
demonstrating how this relatively new form of media consumption simultaneously
dislocates and relocates the caller. 45
The Internet user is also two places at once, either in real or virtual time. Solna
Centre had no Internet café at the time of our study, but the library’s so-called
‘public’ terminals were in nearly constant use. Users could either book a terminal, or
use one of the computers available on a drop-in basis. For people who did not have
access to Internet through a home computer, this public place provided an important
connection to other sites. Many of the library’s regular Internet users were first- and
second-generation immigrants who looked at media from their former homeland and
in their first language. A typical example was two recent Columbian immigrants who
visited the library several times a week to read the Internet newspapers from
Columbia (which the library did not subscribe to) and other Spanish news services,
and then exchanged emails with friends and family located in different countries.
Immigrants did not confine their Internet use to information services in their first
language, however. Camauër found that many used the library’s terminals to access