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Budapest and Paris, to large new shopping complexes, including Minneapolis and
Lisbon, which we visited throughout the course of the project.
In the project’s second phase, we focused on Solna Centre, with the goal of
attaining an overview of the place itself and its relation to its immediate surround-
ings. We traced people as they walked through the mall, to see what they did, where
they shopped, whom they met. We collected the local advertising papers, visited the
home page, and interviewed the architect, the manager and a selection of mall vis-
itors. We gave cameras to a small group of informants and asked them to document
their Solna Centre. We also began to construct a history of the shopping centre and
its relationship to the city of Solna, using archive materials, and gathered informa-
tion about its demographics.
In the third phase, the focus was on specific media circuits, involving fieldwork in
various shops and in the library, that is, the places where media selections were made.
The aim was to conduct participant observation and interviews with employees and
customers in order to trace media into the contexts of everyday use. We soon realized,
however, that the informants with whom we would have the most regular contact were
shop managers and employees. Customers, on the other hand, came and went, a
fleeting population with whom we could at best exchange a few words or ask a couple
of questions. We were confronted with the contradictions between this particular field
as a translocal place and the traditional ideal of fieldwork based on extended face-to-
face interaction with a consistent group of informants. Few of us were able to build
our study of media use on sustained contact with a range of informants. This had
several significant consequences for the project and also led to several innovative tactics
for solving the problem. One consequence was that the shops and their personnel
became more central to our study than we had first envisioned. Another tactic was to
reach consumers through the Internet, through specific chat groups. Some of us based
our analysis of media consumption on one or two key informants. We also used
various means of locating informants who had a connection to Solna, even though we
had not encountered them in Solna Centre. A majority of these tactics, at the same
time that they solved the practical problem of finding informants with relevant expe-
rience, also took account of Solna Centre’s translocality. They also contributed to what
Lena Gemzöe described as the centrifugal character of our research process. 58
SHOPPING IN THE FIELD
Solna Centre was a familiar place to us, even before we began our research there.
Although some of us had never been to this particular shopping centre, we had all
been in similar environments. We had different attitudes toward the place; whereas
some of us felt immediately at home among the shops and shoppers, others in the
research group had tried to avoid this kind of place, preferring to do their shopping
elsewhere. Yet we were all familiar with the goods and services available, the basic
structure of a shopping mall and how to move through this space. We were doing
research in an environment that was not only close to home; it was also part of our
own cultural experience.

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