Consuming Media: Communication, Shopping and Everyday Life - Hardcover

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 scrutinizes 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 globalization and develops a new approach to understanding media consumption.

Johan Fornas is Professor in Culture Studies at Linkoping University, Director of the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden and author of Digital Borderlands. Karin Becker is Professor in Journalism at Stockholm University and in Culture Studies at Linkoping University and author of Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition. Erling Bjurstrom is Professor in Culture Studies at Linkoping University and author of Children and Television Advertising. Hillevi Ganetz is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at Uppsala University.