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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 8

8 Consuming Media

arcades around 1800, department stores in the 1850s and shopping centres after 1950.
Old forms survived but were affected by or integrated into the more recent ones,
resulting in a complex mix of sales forms side by side or overlapping each other. The
department store, with the Paris Bon Marché of 1852 as the first example, had low
and fixed prices, goods that were spectacularly displayed in an impersonal way that
allowed customers an apparently free access. 19 The modern shopping centre or mall
was born in response to limitations of the previous forms and combined elements
from them all, in particular mixing traits from the arcade and the department store.
Benjamin’s take on the theme of commercial space was related to critical discourses
of the 1920s and 1930s, inspired by the unfinished programme for critical theory and
cultural research developed by the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung. Today, accel-
erating modernization processes have modified the conditions and tasks for such crit-
ical cultural studies of media, culture and consumption. The resources of
consumption as well as of communication have multiplied, but the combination of
shopping spaces and media use remain an exemplary prism to highlight modern life.
Benjamin shed light on his own time and space – 1930s Germany – by analysing how
the early modern French arcades in their turn connected to prior epochs and more
distant places. Such superimpositions have multiplied since then. Our own past also
includes Benjamin’s high modern age, and each current setting of media consump-
tion refers back to a series of historical layers. Such sites also contain seeds of different
possible futures, accessible only through critical interpretations. 20
A striking characteristic of contemporary sites of consumption – and of urban
spaces in general – is their conspicuous level of mediatization, in several senses.
Mediated texts and technologies for communication are everywhere. They fill every
corner of any shopping centre, which cannot function without them. Media forms
were also salient in nineteenth- century arcades. Benjamin and his colleagues in the
Frankfurt school gave media phenomena a prominent place in their thinking about
modern life. In later chapters, we will return to some of his influential interpretations
of such phenomena, for instance on the loss of aura of the work of art in the age of
reproduction. At that time it was still possible to depict metropolitan culture at large
as a combination of people and built environment, with media entering only at
specific points. Approaching a shopping centre today immediately places a vast
complex of media forms in focus, in a much more intense and complex manner than
ever before.
A contemporary shopping centre is like a prism through which urgent issues are
broken: a magic entrance to a series of dialectical processes typical of our time, such
as those between culture and economy, private and public, the past and the present,
or the local and the global. It is both a meaning-making text to interpret and a func-
tional machine to be mapped out. It is at once house and street, a delimited room
and an open passageway between built structures, a place and a non-place, a local
unity and a crossroads for currents of goods and people. It must remain safe as well
as exciting, a home for its visitors as well as a place for thrilling events. This balance
between efficiency and attraction had repercussions on the scope of culture in this