Page 84 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 71

by hurried customers who did not actually plan to buy a magazine or newspaper, but
cigarettes or sweets. The bookseller, on the other hand, counts on people entering the
shop because they are interested in books, and that the customers possess a certain
amount of cultural capital. Such customers do not want to think of themselves as
consumers. They cannot be pushed into making a purchase, but have to be coaxed,
and this is why browsing is tolerated. The slower pace in bookshops is thus a sales
strategy, just as the speed at the newsagent’s. In this, the bookseller’s sales strategy
coincides with the interests of the customers – creating a space that is experienced as
being free from raw commercialism, something that both the employees at the book-
shop and the customers pointed out in our interviews.
The significance of place is even more central for people in relation to the non-
commercial alternative – the public library. Both book and newspaper readers say
that the library satisfies the need for reading, at the same time as it saves them the
cost, but they talk just as much about the peace they experience when they sit and
read there. The library is a place without stress, a place for reflection. To some extent
the library shares this relaxed atmosphere with the bookshop, but in part it has
different causes. In a library people can sit in peace and quiet, reading for pleasure or
study, but such reading is absent in the shopping centre’s bookstore or at the tobac-
conist’s, where the focus is on the purchase. A common ground for the contempla-
tive atmosphere seems to be the unique aura of the book, passed on by heredity for
centuries, which gives some of the association of education, quiet concentration and
calm to this medium. This characteristic affects the library as well as the bookshop.
In the former, the aura of the book creates a place that works as an oasis in the middle
of commercialism, in the latter a place that can be seen as a commercial oasis.
The library functions as a macro consumer. When selecting what products to
purchase, and at the moment of purchase of newspapers, magazines and other peri-
odicals, the library can be regarded as an individual, institutional player represented
by staff who (though in consultation with their colleagues and, in this case, acting on
the suggestions of their visitors) choose, order, pay and receive the products. In strict
economic terms, libraries are consumers who through a financial transaction become
the new owner of the media products, using them by lending them to individual citi-
zens.
When the media products are purchased, their use is multiplied as the library in
principle makes the media products available to a limitless number of users. Since the
library is financed with tax revenue, the use is not strictly speaking ‘free’, but it is free
of charge. This dynamic, whereby taxpayers invest in a service, delegate the adminis-
tration to the municipalities or the state, and then enjoy the services free of charge or
at a discount, are central mechanisms in the modern welfare state.

PERIODICALS, PLACE AND IDENTITY
People born in Sweden and whose families have lived in Sweden for generations, and
people who have experienced migration just a few years or a generation before, meet
in the shopping centre. Those who have experiences of migration are placed in and

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