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purchase of specific media products as goods. There is, in other words, a strong ma-
terial basis in media consumption, grounded in the meanings and values people
attribute to media objects and artefacts. Our study goes beyond an interest in media
hardware and technology per se by interpreting these objects in the extended cultural
context of exchange and use, stimulated by cultural anthropologists’ work in theories
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of exchange within and between cultures and across time and space. This can be seen
as a chain of events, practices and meanings that extends media consumption in the
shopping centre to other places of media use. The relationship between people and
media is given the added dimension of media technologies’ material form and phys-
ical presence in everyday life. 60
These examples illustrate the distinction between our research and the vast
majority of studies of media use that focus on media content and reception. The
interaction between media and people cannot be contained within an act of
consumption conceived of as the reception of a media text. Instead of referring to this
interaction as media use, it is more appropriate to describe it as part of a broader
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media experience. The individual act of media consumption always occurs within
the context of an entire life where the presence of media has a continuing, significant
and ever-changing role as one moves from place to place. Within Solna Centre, we
found intersecting crosscurrents that are typically difficult to locate and examine
simultaneously. Questions involving tensions between centre and periphery, between
local and global, between outsider and insider, between public and private, between
culture and commerce, and between subjective experience and the structures of polit-
ical economy, could be kept in focus, if not all at once, in varying degrees and at
various times, guided by the perspectives of our respective disciplines, the collective
research process we had developed and actualized by the events and practices we
observed in the field.
The following chapters cut through the arcades, circuits and networks of media
consumption in a series of ways. We begin with a sequence of photographs made and
gathered during the course of our research, in order to provide a visual overview of
Solna Centre. In the text that follows we then develop basic concepts of media use
and consumption, identify distinctive mechanisms of the main media circuits, and
finally put the picture together and see how they interrelate to shape time and space.
Chapter 2, ‘Consumption and Communication’, highlights important aspects of
the concepts of media, media use and consumption, thereby reproducing the neces-
sary skeleton of the media arcades through which the investigation will then pass.
The chapter challenges widely accepted notions of media and consumption by asking
‘what is consumption?’ and ‘what is a medium?’ thereby establishing new links
between two otherwise rarely juxtaposed lines of thought. Whereas studies of
consumption usually focus on shopping and the acquisition of commodities, and
rarely deal with media commodities, studies of media use tend to emphasize recep-
tion – that is, the ways people read, watch and listen to mediated messages, while
ignoring the ways they find, select and purchase media. Here the whole process
of consumption is reconstructed, offering refreshing ways to rethink foundational

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