Page 214 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 201

up then, 49 per cent circulated as commodities, 20 per cent as more or less public, collectively owned
utilities, while 24 per cent circulated in a more intimate private sphere (10 per cent as loans and 14
per cent as gifts). The figures are applicable to the Swedish population between the ages of nine and
seventy-nine and are taken from Nordicom-Sveriges mediebarometer 2004 (2005).
6. UNESCO has defined books as ‘a non-periodical printed publication consisting of at least 49
pages, excluding covers’. This definition may be questioned, since for instance many children’s
books have less than 49 pages, but even though magazines may well extend beyond that size, their
periodicity definitively rules them out.
7. Clifford (1994 & 1997); Cohen (1987 and 1997/1999); Naficy (1993 and 1999a); Safran (1991);
Tölöylan (1991 and 1996).
8. Since a taxonomy of the different migratory communities would lead away from the focus of this
chapter, we here use the term ‘migrants’ to refer both to people who have moved from another
country or culture and people who have migrated within Sweden.
9. In 2001, about 2,000 people visited the library in the shopping centre on weekdays and 1,200 on
Saturdays. According to a customer survey made during two weeks in April 2000, 11 per cent of
the visitors said that they had come in order to read newspapers and 7 per cent to read magazines
and journals. The survey also shows that the proportion of men who read newspapers there is twice
as large as women.
10. Twenty of our informants were interviewed within the scope of this study about their use of foreign
and provincial papers in the two reading rooms in the library. See Camauër (2002).
11. According to the media researcher Michael Schudson (1984: 142) one-fifth of all books purchased
are gifts. Statistics show the importance of book gifts for reading: 46 per cent of the Swedish popu-
lation had read at least one book in 1997 that they had received as a gift (SOU 1997: 49).
12. According to Paccagnella (1997), cyberethnographic study means participatory observation
(online), interviews and Internet text analysis (in a wide sense). See also Fornäs et al. (2002).
13. It is very common to lend books to, or borrow books from family, friends or acquaintances. This
way of getting access to books is actually the fourth most common way, after buying them from a
bookshop, borrowing them from a library and receiving them as gifts, according to Nordicom-
Sveriges mediebarometer 2004 (2005); see note 5 above.
14. Benjamin (1931/1999: 69).
15. Gabriel and Lang (1995).
16. Thomas (1991: 204).
17. Nor does Mauss place the gift in a power perspective, for example linked to gender (cf. Strathern
1988).
18. Miller (1998: 148).
19. Mauss argues that westerners live in a society where there is a sharp distinction between things and
people, but that we still have echoes in our culture from a time when people and things were indis-
tinguishable, when things were charged with the powers and magic of the owner, which could then
be transferred together with the thing, transformed into a gift, to its new owner (cf. Mauss
1925/1990: 47 and 65).
20. Mauss (1925/1990: 39ff).
21. In this spirit, Ricoeur (2000/2004: 481ff) links gift and forgiveness, acknowledging their moments
of symmetric reciprocity (an exchange of giving and receiving), but also of unconditional love.

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