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far too expensive. The structural result of the commercialization of central city space
is thus that non-profitable public activities are effectively pushed outside the centre’s
glass cage.
In his study for the Passages project, economic historian Martin Gustavsson gave
ample evidence of struggles between media stores and customers in Solna, and in
Sweden at large. 31 Customers may individually or collectively act against single
media stores or chains of stores by simply talking to salespersons or other representa-
tives; by writing letters to the press or to Internet sites; by setting up critical home
pages; by hacking companies’ websites; or by organizing boycotts and other critical
protests. Demands may be raised for adding more goods to the stock, or on the
contrary for omitting media texts and genres that are found in some way problem-
atic (pornographic, sexist, racist, or violent genres, for example). Demands may also
concern the quality or the price of products.
The diversity – or lack thereof – of media forms and genres belongs to the most
common topic of controversy, in particular as it is linked to historical trends towards
centralization and concentration in the distribution and retail systems. The computer
and the mobile phone today are the media tools most commonly associated with the
‘new social movements’ where activists attack aspects of global capitalism. 32 There
was, for instance, some opinion critical against the increasing uniformity of stores for
home electronics. In such cases, some critics used the state as a mediating instance to
solve various problems, by raising complaints to the National Board for Consumer
Policies. The number of such complaints grew steadily from the mid 1990s, and
companies selling home electronics (computers, hi-fi equipment, television sets, CD
and DVD players, cameras, etc.) were the most frequent targets of dissatisfaction.
People used their new PCs and Internet connections to file complaints against the
companies where they had bought them. E-mail started to be used for such purposes
around 1997, and this convenient channel to the authorities had become the domi-
nant one by the turn of the millennium.
Among the 2,702 home-electronic complaints filed in 1995–2000, 25 per cent
came from institutions (private companies, local municipalities or state depart-
ments), 55 per cent from male individuals and 17 per cent from women. The fact
that private firms also sent in complaints to this state office – for instance criticizing
competing firms’ marketing as unfair – indicates the paradoxical interplay between
the two systems, in that commercial actors make active use of the state authority to
regulate market competition. Local municipalities were the largest group among
institutions. In Solna, one citizen went to the town hall citizens’ office with an ad
from the Expert chain, complaining that its information about the costs for cell-
phone subscriptions was not satisfactory. He thus made use of his competence to
convert from consumer to citizen. Solna’s consumer guidance officer first went with
the citizen to the shop in Solna Centre, but no agreement was reached, and the crit-
icism was therefore forwarded to the National Board for Consumer Policies. In this
particular case, no action was taken in the end. Most complaints (more than 70 per
cent) came from private citizens, predominantly men, who are the major consumers