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environment, too, and testified to the existence of definite limits for the much-
discussed tendencies towards the aestheticization of the marketplace and the ‘experi-
ence economy’ in general. There certainly are trends for culture and economy to be
conflated, through the joint processes of culturalization and commercialization. But
the boundaries between these spheres are also repeatedly reconstructed by practices
and discourses that confirm that commerce and culture need a certain separation in
time and space. Understanding such dialectics demand critical hermeneutic work
that is able to register and uphold ambivalence, by oscillating between contradictory
moments, as well as the ambiguity of polysemic or oppositional meanings in the same
text or phenomenon.

THE PASSAGES PROJECT
The convergence of consumption and communication runs both ways. In order to
understand media and communications in the commodified society of today, it is
necessary to see their commercial aspects. Studying the media and their uses in terms
of processes of consumption highlights important patterns and interconnections that
tend to get lost in traditional media research. Locating a media study in a shopping
centre turns out to be an excellent path towards a full picture of the multiple inter-
connections and border-crossings of various kinds of media practices.
This is the goal of this book. It is based on a long-term collective and ethnographic
research project in a contemporary Swedish shopping centre. It has long been
common in media studies to focus on a single mass medium, genre or text at a time,
such as television news or the soap opera. Others have instead chosen to study one
particular social category of people or group of media users, such as families or teenage
peer groups. Starting instead with a specific social and physical place brings to light
other aspects. A shopping centre is a relatively well-defined and manageable frame-
work, but it is also large and complex enough to include a great variety of both media
and people. Studying such a centre illuminates how the stages of consumption are
intertwined, how people and media intersect, and how this is related to communica-
tive processes. This makes it possible to dissolve some calcified categories, for instance
of media genres or social groups. It enables an extension of the media concept to
include all technically organized vehicles for communication; breaking out of the
press/television confines that too often hamper media research even within the domi-
nant cultural studies tradition.
Urban spaces are passages through which material objects, bodies and symbols
move. Some of these spaces have more of a threshold character than others; some
even grow into extensive borderlands. Consumption spaces are particularly marked
by thresholds. Their external limits are often somewhat blurred, in order to make the
entrance easier for potential customers. ‘These gateways – the entrances to the
arcades – are thresholds,’ says Benjamin. 21 A shopping centre can be outlined on a
map and treated like a fairly well-defined building, but is as such more permeable
than many other kind of structure. There is also a certain lack of overview, control
and structure in its interior, so that it is often easy to get lost there. Benjamin often

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