Page 37 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 24

24 Consuming Media

The cultural knowledge one has of the field has the potential for being a valuable
source of insight. The problem is that this kind of knowledge and experience is typ-
ically taken for granted. This background knowledge must be brought to the fore-
ground before the researcher can gain access to it and use it. This requires establishing
a distance or a point of view from which one’s position and perspective can be exam-
ined, a challenge that can be experienced as a conflict, in particular between different
roles. Perhaps the first conflict we experienced during our fieldwork was the urge to
shop. Walking through the mall, notepad in hand, we frequently saw items we wanted
to buy. We would wait until we had finished with the day’s fieldwork, then return to
take a closer look at the desired item. We also used trips to the field as an opportunity,
for example, to post a package, or buy a birthday card or a bottle of wine for dinner.
Initially we experienced this as a conflict between two incompatible roles. It was a
problem to remain focused on fieldwork when we were pulled away by a desire to
make a purchase – to consume. Some of us viewed this desire as a sign of weakness
or a sense of inadequacy about our seriousness as researchers. It was the women
researchers who first discussed this issue and the problem of working in an environ-
ment where one was constantly being addressed as consumer. We began to reflect
critically upon what this meant, which lead us toward insights about shopping and
consumption as gendered activities. We learned to regard these glimpses into our own
desire to consume, not as distractions from what we were really there to do, but as
useful insights into the phenomenon we were studying. They contributed to a subjec-
tive and dialectical understanding of the field, corresponding to Benjamin’s vision of
a historical knowledge.

ARCADES, CIRCUITS, NETWORKS
In Solna Centre we encountered the myriad of forms and practices that constitute
media consumption today. Within the specific environment of a shopping centre, we
observed and interrogated media consumption as a process that on the one hand
anchors people to local histories at the same time that it connects them to transna-
tional flows of goods, services and ideas, as well as to other people and places.
Broadening the concept of media to include, in addition to mass media, other
communication forms and processes that mediate between people and between people
and the environments that they pass through in their daily lives, brought to light a
dynamic and complex web of relationships. Many of the implications of this broad
approach were not evident at the outset, but emerged as the research developed. The
centrality of place, and the ways the concept of place became problematized by our
choice of a shopping centre, and Solna Centre in particular, proved significant for the
kinds of interactions we studied. For example, the sheer omnipresence of media in this
place, including media technologies, images and sounds, with their multiple references
to other media and other places, convinced us of the need to conceptualize media
consumption in broad terms. Another example was the significance of the media’s
materiality, which we realized in the analyses of individual media circuits (which we
present in the next section) that take their point of departure in the selection and