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12 Consuming Media

managers. As spaces of sales and consumption, the main orientation of such centres
is towards the market system, but they are also to an important extent regulated by
the administrative and judicial systems of the state. In this chapter we introduce
Solna Centre as a specific place, with its different and competing histories, and the
methodological issues it raises. The epistemological and political issues of location are
central to understanding the encounters between people and media that take place in
and through this environment. In our efforts to examine simultaneously the aestheti-
cization of the economy and the commercialization of culture, we have found a rich
source in the mediatized space of Solna Centre. 25 What dream images, ambiguities
and contradictions arise in the commercial spaces of today? How are we to study
these spaces and understand the meanings they have in everyday life?
Solna Centre was chosen because it is one of the largest in the region, containing
all the basic kinds of media shops of today, and visited by customers from all social
and ethnic groups. It is a particularly ambiguous place. Like Benjamin’s Paris
Arcades, it is simultaneously ‘house and street’, in having a glass roof and doors
closing at night, yet open during the day and retaining street signs reminiscent of an
old city centre. It is also in fact the centre of Solna City, and as both a city centre and
a shopping centre, is a peculiar mixture of public and commercial space. In addition
to commercial shops, Solna Centre includes public services of the city library and the
town hall within its walls. And in the actual practices within the centre, various inter-
ests intersect and compete, including activities by NGOs, associations, peer groups
and families that make this a highly contested space. Heated debates have arisen
between the centre management and political parties or NGOs over the right to use
the space as a forum (agora) for information, meetings and so on. Visitors to Solna
Centre in fact use the space in many ways: some come to shop, others just pass
through, visit the public library, sit on a bench with a newspaper or watch people
over a cup of coffee – contrary to the mall manager’s and shop owners’ desperate
attempts to maximize sales and profits.
Benjamin’s reflections on the nature of consumption in such a place, and his
concern for how new media and forms of advertising interpolated what was being
offered to passers-by, provided a springboard for our own investigations. Confronted
with a ‘dream world’ of mass culture, Benjamin strove to untie its inherent contra-
dictions. Modes of production which, while privileging the private sphere and the
concept of the subject as individual, had at the same time given rise to forms of social
existence that engendered conformity and the absence of social solidarity and
commonality. In order to dispel this dream world, Benjamin drew on a concept of
history in a dialectical relationship to present experience. History, or rather our expe-
rience of it, does not follow a linear developmental sequence, according to Benjamin,
but must be understood as made up of discontinuous events and impressions. Our
access to the past occurs only through small windows, ‘dream images’ as he called
them, which arise suddenly in response to something we see or experience that evokes
a sudden memory. ‘The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only
as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never