Consuming Media

Communication, Shopping and Everyday Life

Johan Fornäs, Karin Becker, Erling Bjurström, Hillevi Ganetz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781845207601, 9781845207595
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Inspired by Walter Benjamin's classical Arcades Project, Consuming Media is a pioneering exploration of the interface between communication, shopping and everyday life. Based on a six-year study by over a dozen scholars on a specific site, it analyses the links between power, media and consumption in contemporary urban culture.Illustrated with rich ethnographic detail, Consuming Media scrutinises four main media circuits - print media, media images, sound and motion, and hardware machines - to assess how media texts and technologies are selected, purchased and used.Exploring the relations between different media, the nature of cultural citizenship and the power relations of public space, Consuming Media presents an ethnography of globalisation and develops a new approach to understanding media consumption.

1.
LOCATING MEDIA PRACTICES

Media transgress borders. This is their main purpose and function: to put people in contact with someone or something that would otherwise be beyond reach in time or space – like an image from the past or a voice from far away. Communication implies the crossing of borders – historically across time, geographically across space, socially between people, and culturally between texts within various symbolic forms and genres. Media use belongs to the core of human activities in late modern societies, reconfirming that human beings are transgressing animals. For Georg Simmel, ‘the human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating’ and ‘the bordering creature who has no border’.¹

There is in world history, in the modern era, and most particularly in its current late-modern phase, an accelerating growth, spread, diversification and interlacing of communications media across the globe. Media use constitutes increasingly greater parts of everyday life for a growing number of people around the world. This historical process of mediatization draws a widening range of activities into the sphere of media, making mediation an inreasingly key feature of society and everyday life. All contemporary major social and cultural issues directly implicate uses of media. Debates on war, science, ethics, ecology, gender identities, ethnic communities, generation gaps and socialization – all immediately raise questions of media power. Media no longer form a distinct sector, but are fully integrated in human life. This paradoxically means that their enormous influence can never be adequately ‘measured’, since there is no media-free zone with which to compare their effects.

The compression of time and space brought on by digital network technologies is one aspect of this process of mediatization. Never before have so much information and so many kinds of symbolic forms been transmitted across such great distances, stored and preserved for future generations, and shared by so many people for such multifarious purposes. Digitalization has also made possible an unprecedented convergence of media branches (institutions), genres (symbolic modes) and uses (practices), which blurs traditional distinctions.² Media thus not only move across time and space, but also transgress their own traditional classifications. The very concept of media is diffuse and contested, calling for more integrated forms of investigating. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish communication media technologies from other artefacts and to draw clear lines between main types of media. Mediation is everywhere, media technologies are today integrated into almost all other technologies and all social practices, and media forms tend to mix and blend in increasingly complex ways. This pervasive presence and heterogeneous hybridity of media invites an open investigation of how people meet and deal with all kinds of media, and a renewed reflection on the basic ways in which communication is mediated in the contemporary world of late modernity.

However, while communication media cross borders, they do not erase them. Media practices are always situated in time and space. This is rarely adequately reflected in media research. Media use is always spatially and temporally located, while simultaneously both representing and shaping space and time. Mediated communication both takes time and makes time, and it both takes place and makes place. Localizing mediated communication in temporal and spatial settings makes it possible to discern connections and distinctions that are easily forgotten. A cultural studies perspective on media use focuses how meanings, identities and power are produced and implied in practices that are simultaneously interactive and textual, both localized and globalized. The acquisition and use of media are embedded in everyday lifeworlds where people interact using multiple technologies as tools of communication. These have essential time-space co-ordinates. Recent transformations of communication and consumption processes through mediatization, aestheticization, digitalization, hybridization and globalization have necessitated new and better ways of understanding the uses of media in everyday life, in at least three respects.

1. First, the widening forms of mediation and their mutual interdependence due to dense intermedial transactions necessitate a broader concept of media and a focus on the interplay between different media circuits. Media studies need to respond to media expansion by including a wider range of communication technologies: traditional mass media as well as interpersonal and interactive media. And as a response to media convergence, one must investigate numerous ways in which different kinds of media interrelate.
2. Second, it is crucial to restore the full temporal process of consumption, through the four main phases from selection and purchase to use and disposal. The communicative encounters between people and media form extended and varied processes of interlaced consumption chains, which the traditional division of consumption and reception studies usually bifurcates. The combinatory ways in which various kinds of media circuits are selected, bought, utilized and resold, thrown or given away typically differ, depending on the duration, setting and character of each such phase. And these processes look different when media are immediately consumed, hoarded and collected, loaned or used as gifts.
3. Third, processes of consumption and communication have to be contextualized in space and time. All media are used in specific places. Until recently, media research has tended to make the spaces of media practices invisible, depicting communication and media reception as if they happened anywhere. There is now a growing interest in the geographies of communication, in line with a more general effort to situate cultural processes.³

Localizing media consumption in physical and social space and time makes visible connections and distinctions that are otherwise neglected. This book explores what can be learnt from a consistently localizing approach to media practices. It starts from a specific site rather than from specific kinds of media or specific audiences. A shopping centre offers a context for studying late-modern consumption typical in the sense that most kinds of people and media flow through such a space. Investigating how media are sold, bought and used by people in such a centre, a wide range of interactions between people and media are discerned. Based on solid ethnographic research, this book offers a unique and comprehensive presentation of late-modern media practices in their full complexity, cutting across boundaries such as those between production and consumption or between various kinds of media. It thus enables a transgression of the prevailing borders that otherwise hampers a critical understanding of how different localities, media, people and practices are interconnected in a mediatized world. It highlights how people consume media, and how media in a sense also consume people, mediating and shaping their interrelations, actions and thoughts. It thereby indicates how deeply intertwined communication and shopping are in everyday life of today.

PARIS 1800 – BERLIN 1900 – STOCKHOLM 2000

This approach moves not only translocally between contemporary spaces of media consumption across the globe, but also across temporal distances. Each time-space has links to other ones – through historical memory and through anticipatory imagination. One particularly fruitful move leaves our present location in Stockholm at the threshold of the twenty-first century and follows the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) back to early twentieth century Berlin, continuing in his company back to the Paris of the early and mid nineteenth century. Benjamin’s work offers an historical backdrop as well as a methodological influence. His unfinished Passagen-Werk, written in the 1930s, posthumously published in German in 1982 and in English in 1999 as The Arcades Project, was an admirable effort to depict the fluidity and incongruence of the modern world by studying all the people and commodities that flowed through the commercial urban spaces of the nineteenth-century Paris shopping galleries.⁴ As a critical historical materialist on the fringe of the dissident early Frankfurt school, with both Jewish and Marxist philosophical affinities, Benjamin developed ideas about modern mediatized society that still remain valid and useful. There are innovative traits to be taken up from his specific analyses of modern times and media, from his consciously ambiguous position combining sensual fascination and sharp critique, and from his labyrinthine, winding and multifarious writing style, creating a montage of voices from theoretical as well as popular sources.

Passages of consumption transgress times as well as space. Our study juxtaposes early, high and late modernity, as well as the European locations of Paris, Berlin and Stockholm. Such double movements highlight historical and spatial specificities, but also establish continuities across chronological sequences or geographical maps. It is not only cultural analysts who choose to juxtapose times and spaces in order better to understand their differences. Urban shopping spaces themselves also make such juxtapositions, not least by using media of communication to construct memories and interactions through superimposing distant and past images onto the local and the present. Media assist other human artefacts in preserving and reworking the past within the present, and they also aid other transportation technologies in overcoming physical distance. Media are cultural tools that compress, juxtapose and define time and space. Media texts and technologies are integral to the production of experiences, of memories and of dream images – and thus of the identities of individuals, collectivities and sites.

Media play key roles in Benjamin’s texts. One influential example is his idea that mass reproduction eroded the quasi-sacred ‘aura’ of art – the unique sense of presence in time and space that was profaned by print, posters, photographs and phonographs.⁵ But his phenomenological analyses of everyday life were also filled with references to advertising images and texts that in papers and signs expressed the fantasies and dreams of consuming collectives, and to the practices of people who encounter and use a large range of media, as collectors, flâneurs or ordinary city dwellers, consumers and citizens. His interest in arcade ‘passages’ was not arbitrary. They offered a chance to study the fleeting transitions and contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences inherent in modern urban life, where the dichotomies of house/street, inside/outside, private/public, commerce/culture and consumption/communication were repeatedly deconstructed and reconstituted. His writings are exemplary in their understanding of media culture in terms of dynamic processes, flows, transitions and mediations rather than in stiff and static categories. These passages run through urban spaces as well as temporal phases, indicating a non-linear historical dimension where dream-like utopias and nostalgic memories intersect with the fleeting present, resulting in the unstable uncontemporaneities that define modernity itself.

Benjamin used historic inquiry to search for hidden tendencies beneath the surface of official culture. Like an archaeologist or genealogist, he traced the criss-crossing roots of contemporary phenomena, but also looked for repressed memories of past brutalities and forgotten dreams of a better life.⁶ In The Arcades Project, Paris after 1800 was the frame within which he placed an exuberant series of fragments trying to come to grips with how modern life was formed in urban constructions and media texts of all kinds. The classical arcades were arched passages, covered walks lined with shops. The winding, arched passageway is frequently used as a metaphor for individual processes of communication and consumption, and in the contemporary media world, such arcs are woven together into extremely intricate paths along which people and media move and interact.

The past lives on in the present, in surviving traces, documents and monuments that are continually engaged in collective and individual identity constructions.⁷ The future resides in the past and present, in those moments of anticipation where people dream of new worlds. Many such dreams remain imaginary; others are transformed into realities, often in unintended and sometimes even catastrophic ways – as witnessed by victims of regimes like that of the Khmer Rouge. The distant is also present in the nearby, through images and voices that carry experiences across space. Shopping spaces and practices of media use are filled with references to the foreign and the past, made to reinforce impressions of intimacy and urgency. This is typical of the modern epoch. Benjamin defined the ‘modern’ not as just everything new, but rather as ‘the new in the context of what has always already been there’.⁸

Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wish images; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production. At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated – which includes however, the recent past. These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past. In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history (Urgeschichte) – that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• The Authors
• List of Tables and Figures
• 1 Locating Media Practices
• 2 Consumption and Communication
• 3 Print Media
• 4 Media Images
• 5 Sound and Motion
• 6 Hardware Machines
• 7 Intermedial Crossings
• 8 Layers of Time
• 9 Translocal Spaces
• 10 Communicative Power
• Notes
• References
• Index