Page 32 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 19

essential to blurring the boundary between public and private space in this urban
environment where consumption is the norm.

A TRANSLOCAL FIELD
Most visitors and employees in Solna Centre live in the surrounding area. According
to the manager, the average mall visitor comes three times a week. A third of them
drive, a third come by bus or subway and a third of them walk. The demographics
of Solna correspond quite closely to the Swedish population as a whole, given age,
income and ethnicity.
This relatively stable set of facts does not, however, tell us very much about how
people relate to this place, to the people they encounter here nor the meanings it has
for them. In late modernity, we can no longer assume that people ground their iden-
tities first and foremost in relation to a geographic place. As media increasingly refer
to other places, and as people’s own experiences of other localities broadens, cultural
theorists have developed new concepts to account for identity processes that no
longer depend on face-to-face communication within a group. Benedict Anderson
developed the concept of ‘imagined communities’ to account for the ways that a
49
sense of national identity is spread via media. Arjun Appadurai’s research on public
culture and global cultural flows is based on analyses of how human mobility and the
rise of new media forms intersect in the process of constructing cultural identities.
Aspects of local culture are combined with experiences, many of them mediated,
from other places. 50 This gives rise to what Johan Durham Peters has characterized
as ‘bifocality’ as people learn to shift focus between local and global phenomena
within their field of experience. 51 These and other ways of understanding the
meaning of space, place and identity will be further developed in Chapter 9.
The cross-currents created through these encounters between people, other local-
ities and media also affect the character of Solna Centre. Its histories and conflicts,
and the experiences of its visitors and employees, include continual references to
other places and events. Politically, economically, culturally it exists in a dynamic
relationship with regional, national, transnational and global developments, a
phenomenon continually reflected in the ways media are used and in the cross-
currents between different media. This means that it is not only the people we meet
in this place whose culture is shaped by their translocal experience. Solna Centre itself
is a translocal place, where meanings cannot be fully understood in isolation from
other locales, both near and far, in both time and space.
This has methodological implications for how we designated the ‘field’ of our
study, that is, in concrete terms, where we carried out the research. To what extent
are we able to keep the translocality of Solna Centre in focus, at the same time that
we concentrated our efforts on a specific place? The question of locating the ‘field’
has been of increasing concern for social anthropology, where our study of Solna
Centre drew much of its methodological inspiration. There have been many chal-
lenges to the anthropological paradigm, most stridently from within the discipline,
which pictures the anthropologist heading off to spend an extended time in the

Locating Media Practices 19