Page 181 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 168

168 Consuming Media

As nodes for trade across geographic distances, market places have always been
places where transnational currents of communication intersect with transnationally
54
mobile people. Today, shopping centres are such nodes, key locations for the devel-
opment of cosmopolitan cities and identities. Social intercourse in such places is
often volatile and transient in character, though visitors and staff carve out niches of
relatively stable belonging even in these passageways. People thus balance and oscil-
late between, on the one hand, provisionally identifying and inhabiting certain
places, naming them and investing them with meaning based on memories of
personal experiences, and, on the other, moving rapidly between places across space
and sometimes also time, either materially and physically, or virtually in their minds
and mediated social interactions.
Interacting with people, media and other commodities under late-modern condi-
tions puts great demands on the ability to make meanings: to read and interpret the
flood of signs and multimodal texts approaching from every corner of these passages.
There is a similar pressure on the capacity to explore, express and shape identities:
both individual and collective, both those of persons – of the self and of others, and
those of places – of the centre, the city and the nation through which one moves. The
increasingly complex and transient mixtures of late- modern lifeworlds finally also
involve shifts in power relations, to which the last chapter will turn.