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166 Consuming Media

– as information source and aid in language learning – for many of the reading
room’s visitors.
Among the diverse group of people whose background is not Swedish, two distinct
ways can be identified of using media to maintain and re-establish a relationship to
place. First, the selection of transnational media – periodicals and Internet sources –
in order to maintain a link to the place which was once home, and a continuity of
local knowledge about that place. Second, the ways that local media – in this case
Swedish newspapers and magazines – provide a way for transnational people to estab-
lish links to the place and perspectives that constitute the new environment of the
local. In these two aspects of media use, translocality is produced in a doubling of the
dynamic between places that are simultaneously global and local.
TAKING PLACE, MAKING SPACE
Some media practices tend to emphasize and continually (re-)construct place identi-
ties, symbolizing collective memories that link specific people to specific places. This
is exemplified by many sports – not least team sports, where a sense of local
anchorage is upheld as a key to authenticity and fan identification. On a larger scale,
it is also true for international athletics championships, where each country’s partici-
pants form ‘troops’, geographically linking the ‘team’ to its national space, even
though connections to any particular town are much weaker than in team sports.
Television and other media partly act to erode such spatial positionings, by enabling
cross-local and transnational identifications as well.
In other cases, it is the transient side that dominates. Films are certainly viewed in
certain places, for instance a specific cinema theatre that may be remembered as
special by those who spent a part of their youth there, and there are also some few
examples of recording places that are developed into tourist sites. But such connec-
tions tend to be secondary to the experience of taking part in an enacted narrative
whose main place is virtual and not strongly territorialized.
No strict lines separate these two extremes, and individual practices criss-cross
between them, as people shift between fixating particular places by inhabiting, naming,
using and remembering them, and transcending them by moving between sites – phys-
ically through travel or virtually in media use. In this way, people become transnational
through local and localizing practices, making use of a wide range of media circuits in
order to connect to many different places, thereby linking them to each other, in
dynamic and polycentric networks. Some individuals and groups may lean towards the
‘localist’ side, preferring media practices that strongly link them to a specific place.
Others tend towards ‘cosmopolitanism’, favouring forms of communication and
consumption that enable them to become maximally mobile. 50 However, while there
are people who can be identified as ‘locals’ or ‘cosmopolitans’, the two sides are in most
cases rather seamlessly blended. People ambivalently move between the two positions
through multifaceted media uses where they for instance develop identifications with
many different yet specific localities, and where local spaces like the shopping centre
itself is full of echoes of and openings towards a wide range of other places.