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with an emphasis on intermedial passages between different media. At the same time
as it critically deconstructs the very idea of fixed and distinct types of media, it never-
theless distinguishes some main differentiations made by media users, and discerns
key forms of intermedial connection, proposing a model of how media circuits are
produced and interrelated in our age of convergence and digitalization.
Chapter 8, ‘Layers of Time’, examines how media are used to construct time,
memories and identities. It scrutinizes the ways in which media consumption is both
located in time and constructs time, and it includes a section on collecting that also
connects to Benjamin’s analyses. Chapter 9, ‘Translocal Spaces’, deals with mobility
and spatiality, analysing how media and people move across national and geographic
boundaries while simultaneously reconstructing localities, bridging and dividing
places and geographic regions.
Finally, Chapter 10, ‘Communicative Power’, develops a critical perspective on
forms of power and resistance involved in communicative practices, based on our
ethnographic findings. Political, economic and cultural front lines are investigated.
An analysis is made of options and forms of resistance in everyday life and of the pol-
itics of media consumption, accounting for dialectical and multidimensional tensions
between institutions and texts, structures and agencies, private and public, commu-
nication and consumption. The chapter ends with discussing issues of cultural citi-
zenship and communicative rights, and finally summarizes the accomplishments of
this whole study.

PICTURES OF PASSAGES
For Walter Benjamin, the culture of consumption that emerged in Europe during the
nineteenth century was intertwined with two phenomena: the spread of photography
and the new shopping arcades. Benjamin’s entire Arcades project is marked by a
fascination for the relationships being established there between new technologies
and new ways of seeing. Throughout his investigation of new forms of consumption
runs his sharp interest for the meeting points between people and pictures, and in
particular the desire aroused through the possibilities of mass-produced images. In
his ‘Exposé’ of 1935, he writes:
For its part, photography greatly extends the sphere of commodity exchange,
from mid-century onward, by flooding the market with countless images of
figures, landscapes, and events which had previously been available either not at
all or only as pictures for individual consumers. To increase turnover, it renewed
its subject matter through modish variations in camera technique – innovations
that will determine the subsequent history of photography. 62
Photography changed ways of seeing. To regard one’s environment as filled with
things to look at, offering a wealth of objects to be consumed with the eyes was,
according to Benjamin distinctly new. The architecture, display windows and signs
of the Paris Arcades had radically altered the conditions for visual representation, as
goods and people met in a constant and ever-changing flow of impressions.

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