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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 169

10. COMMUNICATIVE POWER

On the basis of our ethnographic findings, the previous three chapters have cut across
media circuits, in order to fully develop the three main themes of the Passages project
mentioned at the start of our inquiry. In Chapter 7, we explored the widening of the
media world and the increasing interplay between media circuits of our age. In
Chapter 8, we developed a multidimensional understanding of temporality in media
consumption. In Chapter 9, we analysed the spatially situated processes of commu-
nication. At various points, all these themes touched upon the forms of power and
resistance that were outlined at the end of Chapter 2. In this concluding chapter, it
is now time to focus on this theme. Based on the power plays found in the spatial
setting of a contemporary shopping centre, this chapter discusses the main forms in
which media power is formed and contested. Three co-existing front lines are iden-
tified: (1) the political front lines, primarily related to the public municipal institu-
tions dependent on the state system; (2) the economic front lines, involving the
centre’s management and shops, based in the market system; and (3) the cultural
front lines, engaging civil society and anchored in the lifeworld. This leads to a
consideration of issues of cultural citizenship and communicative rights. The chapter
then ends by summing up the main insights developed throughout this book.
Media power is always spatially and socially situated, and the individual and insti-
tutional agents involved interact closely and in different ways with the contexts in
which texts and subjects – media and people – meet and produce meaning and iden-
tity. While some strive to control media spaces as resources of social order, others
explore their contradictory fissures as openings to radical change. Different social and
geographic spaces offer different constellations and opportunities in both directions.
Shopping spaces are not only crossed by people and media, but also by structurally
anchored interests and practices. Shopping centres are spaces where the different
forms of power intersect and frame everyday life and media use in an extraordinarily
complex and dense manner. Although primarily market places, they are actually a
mixture of market and municipally organized spaces, involving a number of stores,
offices, administrative institutions and public services. Hence, people visit the centre
both as consumers and clients of public services. There turn out to be continuous
struggles between individual shops and chains, centre staff and management,
producers and distributors, and visitors and customers of different kinds.
Historically the ownership of the grounds on which Solna Centre is located has
1
shifted in ways that reflect the overall trends in Swedish politics and economy. From
1943, when Solna became a town on its own, to the beginning of the twenty-first
century, the ownership has shifted from what can be called ‘landlord capitalism’ (up