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

10 Consuming Media

states that arcades are ambivalent places: both buildings and streets, houses and
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passages. ‘Arcades are houses or passages having no outside – like the dream.’ While
this stimulates sales, it also nourishes unconscious impulses and communicative prac-
tices that are not so easily channelled into commodity consumption only.
The design of the Passages project was inspired by Benjamin’s work. 23 The core
idea was to study the multifarious ways in which a broad spectrum of media are
circulated by a broad spectrum of people in and around such a space of consump-
tion, thereby exploring key forms of the contradictory interlacing of consumption
and communication. An ethnographic investigation of a shopping centre as a place
where people encounter, buy and use media is a particularly fruitful way to approach
a series of central issues concerning media consumption in general, since such a
centre is an accessible and reasonably well-defined site through which most kinds of
people and media pass, and where key social processes take place – a most suitable
entrance to the world of late-modern media consumption!
Media use today is globalized, but is also always localized. Shopping centres have
many different shapes in various world regions, but generally contain a series of indi-
vidually run shops organized within a common frame together with restaurants and
other services. The centre studied by the Passages project exemplified the city centre
model, which usually contains a wide range of facilities. Other kinds of centre are
located outside the municipal areas (external centres), or have a more limited range
of stores covering the immediate needs of a smaller living area (local centres), or a
more thematically specialized profile in larger inner cities (niche gallerias).
We chose one of Sweden’s largest centres, Solna Centre north of Stockholm. It is
in many ways an ‘average’, ‘ordinary’ Swedish place, with important similarities with
corresponding sites in other parts of the world, but of course it is also in obvious ways
characteristically different from elsewhere. Sweden is the largest of the Nordic coun-
tries, with 9 million citizens and with major media and cultural industries, notably
in telephones (Ericsson), publishing, film and music. Stockholm is the capital, with
nearly two million inhabitants, its fragmented archipelago facing the Baltic Sea. Since
1943, Solna has been established as a small city of its own, with roughly 60,000
inhabitants today. However, it is only some ten minutes north of Stockholm city, and
so well connected to the capital that it for all practical purposes serves as one of its
close suburbs. Solna is in many ways a typical Swedish town. The social composition
of its population in terms of ethnicity, class and age is close to the Swedish and
Stockholm average. It was the historical cradle of Swedish cinema. The industrial
spaces, remnants of the golden age, where Greta Garbo and Ingmar Bergman once
worked, are now being transformed for new purposes, not far from its centre.
Another cultural highlight is the successful soccer team AIK with one of its particu-
larly noisy supporter groups ‘Black Army’. A third is the preserved home of the
popular naivist painter, Olle Olsson-Hagalund.
The city centre of Solna was formed in 1965 in order to integrate the dispersed parts
of the town. Some eighty shops, a town hall and a library were built around its main
square. This town centre was gradually redeveloped into a shopping centre, and finally,