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European Journal of Communication
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Travels in Thirdspace

Experiential Suspense in Mediaspace — The Case of America (Un)known

Amanda Lagerkvist

Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS), Department of English, Uppsala University Box 527 SE 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden, amanda.lagerkvist{at}engelska.uu.se

What happens to people's relationship to places that have been subjected to a high degree of mediation? The aim of this article is to engage in current debates on mediaspace and the mediatization of travelling, by offering an empirical and conceptual qualification to this discussion, through a study of the experiences of Swedes travelling in the US in the 1950s. This article shows that in understanding the relationship between communication and geography, it is vital to focus on the level of experience and on what Edward Soja, following Henri Lefebvre, calls `thirdspace'. The argument is that while the journeys were scripted, travellers' 'knowledge' of the land was seriously challenged as they ended up in thirdspace suspense, displaced in a country that was both fiction and fact, known and unknown. Studying the intersection of travelling and mediation will render new insights into the meanings that mediation carries, which push beyond common polarizations: mediation has to be conceived in terms of more than either powerful images or playfulness/resistance. As mediation interlaces with the imagined and the lived, ambivalences, dissonances and incommensurable affections towards the places at hand are generated.

Key Words: 1950s • mediation • space • travelling • USA

European Journal of Communication, Vol. 23, No. 3, 343-363 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0267323108092539
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