Locating Intermediality : Socialization by Communica tion and Consumption in the Popular Cultural Third Places of the Music Club and Football Stadium

Based on two different case studies in the realm of popular culture, my contribution will clarify the mechanisms involved in the (symbolic) production and consumption of space. The music club and the soccer stadium function much in the same way, as interfaces between producers and consumers of places, prompting “pro-sumption of space” (Raumprosumenten). A loss of function in such “third places” cannot be linked to the transition from informal cellar clubs to (soberly designed) regional discos outside the city – or from the national-league stadium to the World Cup arena (also outside the city). Nor can it be attributed to the mediatization of these spaces by technology. On the contrary, we find an exponentiation of what third places had always already been, spaces of ”intermediality” (between work and leisure, between seriousness and play, between young people and adults). In the World Cup stadium, unique events, experiences and communicative propensities are produced in a highly consistent manner by means of communication on different levels in series. In such cases, the spectators in the stadium, just like visitors to music clubs, rarely behave as passive consumers of what is staged, yet both groups contribute by their presence and symbolic activity to the success of such productions in the stadium and the club.


Locating Intermediality: Socialization by Communication and Consumption in the Popular-Cultural Third Places of the Music Club and Football Stadium
In an email interview with curator Doris Rothauer on the occasion of the art project "Third Places" against the backdrop of the 2004 steirischer herbst festival, the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg explains his criticism of consumer worlds such as Disneyland or the shopping malls: These have no value for the social in a society, but are merely servants of consumption, in stark contrast to something like the good old marketplace.
Disneyworld and -land, and American shopping malls in addition, are designed to discourage interaction between customers.As the primary activity of third places is interaction, the contrast could hardly be more extreme.… Marketplaces have social as well as monetary value but shopping malls have no social value (Oldenburg /Rothauer 2004: 17).Oldenburg (1999) had made similar arguments in his much-discussed study on those "third places ".Those third places -mediated by the many little episodes of personal interactions between guests, mediated by dialogue as well as visual contact, by bar-room slogans as well as sophisticated conversation -they are symbolic and signifying forms and worlds of socialization, mediated by communications of all kinds, thus fulfilling a social objective.Oldenburg was thinking thereby of little corner bars, local cafés or the old established bookstore, at whose sofa table one looks at new books after work or on Saturday and in the process starts talking with other customers or especially with the local book dealer-and not only about the new novel by Umberto Eco.Now, one does not have to be a social romantic like Oldenburg or the son of a bookseller to be able to observe and describe such third places.What Oldenburg defines as third places of socialization between family and work as well as their modes of socialization have changed over time.Here types of (mediatized) communication play a large role, so it seems like a proper thing for scholars of communication and media culture to deal with these places and their symbolic transformations.Changes can clearly be observed in the old third places as in new third places that have developed and proven themselves in the course of the media's evolution and that are increasingly interconnected with media products. 2Not only coffee houses, pubs, etc. mentioned by Oldenburg are meeting places for getting informed and communicating.There are also commercialized, professionalized, and institutionalized third places such as shopping malls or theme parks, as Gernot Böhme (2001) has noted, which are sensed directly, theatralized and stage-managed -but as something much greater than purely pragmatic, socially insignificant collection sites for goods. 3 Oldenburg's focus was on sites that were not at first centered on classical shopping.If we want to discuss Oldenburg's ideas in current contexts and possibly make them productive, a social domain presents itself that (to some extent) meanders back and forth between those old third places (the beer garden, pub, the café) transfigured nostalgically by Oldenburg and those sharply condemned "centers of commerce": popular culture.Heavily consumer-oriented and increasingly commercialized and mediatized, virtually provoking communication, necessitating communication from conversation to entertainment and (in the truest sense of the term) space-appropriating -all these things comprise popular culture.In the following, this domain will first be described more precisely as our underlying field of investigation.Then, using the examples of the popular-cultural place of music club and football stadium, we will work out different modes of communication, mediatization and commercialization, describing the structural transformation of third places.These thoughts will finally be summarized in the conclusion to the essay.

Popular Culture as a Field of Third Places
Here we understand popular culture as that commercialized social domain that produces content in industrial fashion and that is conveyed by the mass media and by numerically predominant groups -no matter what stratum or class they belong to -and that gets used with pleasure and processed further in the form of new self-produced media products (see Jacke 2004: 21).The agents of popular culture are under a great deal of pressure to innovate, and thus under time pressure as well.In mass-medial communication, this applies on the level of production and distribution as well as that of reception and processing.Agents in popular culture are particularly imaginative in matters of the economy of attentiveness -driven by the mainstream and the dissidence necessary to it, i.e., by the ongoing, procedural opposition between innovation and tradition. 4 Both the commodification of subjects, objects and actors in popular culture and the strategies and tactics involved in the everyday production and reception of communication products are what make popular culture so appealing today to researchers on motivation, marketing and advertising (see de Certeau 1988).Popular culture, especially in the advertising and consumption industries, serves as a seismograph for developments across society (see Jacke 2005Jacke , 2006)).The continuous interplay between production and consumption, between art and commerce, and the intermingling of these levels -all this is typical in popular culture and all this forms and necessitates places which not only resemble Oldenburg's transfigured third places but also those similarly defined transitional places that French anthropologist Marc Augé (1994) has compellingly described.
Popular culture takes place as an "compulsory elective event" [Wahlpflichtveranstaltung] (Keller 2003: 116), as a completely serious game, a momentous simulation or pioneering exercise.Popular-cultural places are particularly well suited to experimentation that is social, to trying out consumption and communication.Here boundaries can be tested and transferred: third places "are commer-cial institutions that combine shopping, dining and entertainment in targeted fashion, blurring existing boundaries between high, popular and consumer culture" (Weh 2004: 31).As a result, the curator of the aforementioned art project "Third Places" sees these places themselves as a metaphor "for the trend toward event culture even in the field of art [and] for the convergence of high and low culture, of elite art and everyday culture" (Rothauer 2004: 9).Processes of demarcation and exclusion take place here as elsewhere by means of communication, in spite of Oldenburg's fears.
Popular culture, as it is understood in the present essay, can only be thought of in connection with (mass) media and is thus framed in terms of media culture (for more detail, see Jacke 2004).Contrary to widespread reservations about this form of culture, mass-mediated popular culture is not necessarily associated with passivity on the part of its consumers.Consumption and reception can also be production, or re-production.And even those who just seem to be simply subjected to it can possibly do so in an active way, that is, tuning in in order to tune out. 5  When the British cultural scholar John Storey (2003a: 148) speaks, for instance, about "[s]hopping as popular culture", this means that shopping is actively fun and that it can even be processed subversively, but in any event it is pursued and experienced with others.On the one hand, the mode of socialization changes in its assessment of indoctrination ("Buy or die!") toward a socially-oriented organization of the self ("Express yourself!").On the other hand, the mode of consumption itself undergoes a shift.We are not merely asked "to buy what is on sale but to consume the public space" (Storey 2003a: 150).This consumption of popularcultural places is highly concerned with communication.Opportunities to do so are clearly provided by media, and consumers go on to process these in completely different ways and at different levels of productivity. 6Here, not only what is consumed but also the way it is consumed, is constitutive of identities.
Consumption is a significant part of the circulation of shared and conflicting meanings we call culture.We communicate through what we consume.Consumption is perhaps the most visible way in which we stage and perform the drama of selfformation.In this sense, then, consumption is also a form of production (Storey 2003b: 78).
Storey's account must be supplemented by our present deliberations: "We communicate by how we consume!"And this mode of consumption always played an important role in the construction of identities -both individually and collectively -at third places.Even in the corner bar or bookstore (to follow Oldenburg), there is a balancing of socialization between individuality and sociality, between private and public spheres, between inclusion and exclusion (along the categories of age, gender, class, group, etc.).In short, it is a matter of constructing identity."The imaginative hedonism of the urban setting in its theatricality is employed as a way to stage-manage oneself. . . .Urban 'third places' today serve less as places of communication than as stages for cultivating one's image" (Gau 2004: 26).Such a self-presentation, however, occurs precisely in the bookstore as well 334 Culture Unbound, Volume 1, 2009 as in the football stadium by means of a communicative orientation to others.Images can only be created by communication and are not "swallowed up" by or at places.In such a way, constructing and cultivating images are highly communicative processes, particularly on the practice fields of popular culture.An extremely productive, pop-cultural processing of third place communication offerings takes place in the person of those non-professional experts in imagemaking and social orientation, i.e., the fans who receive, consume, use and modify media goods.In his ethnographic study, Henry Jenkins (1992), following Michel de Certeau (1988), has identified ten creative ways how various fan groups process media products: recontextualization, temporal extension, characterrefocusing, moral distortion, genre-switching, crossing-over, characterpositioning, personalization, emotionalization, and eroticization.Clearly, not exactly every fan is a productive or even subversive bricoleur, as suggested by many of the fan studies emerging out of Cultural Studies.With respect to de Certeau's ideas, the literary scholar Jörg Dünne (2006: 300) reminds us: "It is nonetheless critical to ask whether everyday spatial practices can only be conceived as supporting existing orders and whether they cannot be assigned at least a constitutive function in relation to spatial order."Even Storey (2003a) explicitly points out that not every recipient is capable of dealing independently with media products: Consumption, therefore, is always an encounter between the materiality of a cultural commodity and the cultural formation of a consumer, which takes place in a particular context.Whether the outcome is manipulation or resistance, or a complicated mixture of the two, is a question which cannot be answered in advance of the actual encounter (Storey 2003b: 112).
In the person of the fan, then, producer and consumer come together. 7Fans are in some sense "extreme consumers", and perhaps this is what makes them so interesting (not only) from the viewpoint of sociology of consumption.
Two pop-cultural third places that until now have hardly been illuminated in communication or media studies are examples well-suited for illustrating our observations: the music club and the football stadium.Both places function similarly, as interfaces between seller and customer, between producer and consumer (typically as a fan) and between anonymous industry (control, public sphere) and individual needs (imagination, private sphere).They thus represent a relevant field of investigation for an analysis oriented on Oldenburg and de Certeau. 8Are there opportunities for authentic interaction only in the basement club and not in a large disco, only in the regional stadium and not in the World Cup arena?Below, we will take a more exact look at these places, their specific media and their opportunities for collectivity (socialization / communalization / control) and individuality (self-imagination / self-control). 9

The Music Club
An almost prototypical popular-cultural place of intermediality [das Dazwischen] and consequently of mediation is the music club.In general, we are talking about clubs or (formerly) discos, regardless (for the present) what style of music is being played or performed there. 10Clubs or even "clubbing" (most comparable with the rather subdued term ausgehen in German) are places and activities positioned between diverse poles.With respect to time, people move in clubs between day and night (and day), between work and sleep, between the private and the public (materially and spatially).Socially, people move between being alone, with friends and in intimate anonymity ("we know each other") as well as between having it together ("sober") and not having it together ("ecstatic"): "This is resistance found through losing your self, paradoxically to find your self" (Malbon 1998: 281).Clubs are, in a manner of speaking, institutionalized places of the ephemeral.The British geographer and promoter Ben Malbon (1998Malbon ( , 1999) ) in his studies on clubbing sees them as compensating for the loss of socializing in public places or for those places having generated non-places (the end of the market square): "Public spaces in the city often seem designed more for traveling through than for socializing within -more fleeting spaces than meeting places" (Malbon 1998: 267).Clubs, however, hold onto these travelers for a few hours without fixating the visitors.However, what Guido Zurstiege ( 2008) has shown in his essay on shopping malls also applies to clubs: that efforts involving a great deal of personnel and media are needed to create the illusion of an atmospheric club flow. 11The clubs themselves are equally fleeting, but nonetheless make stopovers again and again, orienting themselves to trends and every few months moving around Berlin to new locations (e.g., the WMF Club) as Anja Schwanhäußer (2005) and Geoff Stahl (2007) have documented in subcultural movements and their "spatialization" [Verräumungen] (as meant by Christian Schwarzenegger [2008]).The communities formed there may only meet temporarily, but they do so in serial fashion.
The music played there has a decisive influence on the club atmosphere as the basis of various types of consumption (alcohol, tobacco, drugs of all kinds, media products, sound, and communication).Or again in the words of Malbon: "Yet in each case, it is the ability of music (and sound more generally) to create an atmosphere (an emotionally charged space) which is of crucial importance, for it is largely this atmosphere that the clubbers consume" (Malbon 1998: 271).This music, the sound of a club, is responsible for the framing of the atmospheric mentioned by Böhme.In these ways, in fact, popular music has structured and marked even public spaces and thus itself has become an everyday phenomenon. 12At the same time, music is the most important media product of the club in three respects:

Narrative machines and the prompting of subsequent communications:
As an unending fabric of constantly renewed and repeated narrations, which many people take part in (see Gauber 2006), the sounds and their stories animate consumption on the dance floor, but possibly afterwards as well, in the repeated consumption of tracks or songs near the dance floor and at home.They provide the basis in theme parks or temples of consumption that is necessary for making the "shopping machines" into less suspecting "narrative machines" and their production of nonbinding reality landscapes (see Legnaro/Birenheide 2005).

Communicative relief:
As a release from unreasonable demands, exciting sounds also reduce one-track conversations, thus relieving people from making small-talk, with the help of dancing: "Shake your booty!" "Dancing might be seen as an embodied statement by the clubber that they will not be dragged down by the pressures of work, the speed and isolation of the city, the chilly interpersonal relations one finds in many of the city's social places" (Malbon 1998: 271).
3. Social Orientation: Finally, the sounds serve as a way of reducing complexity, by suggesting a (often) clearly defined path through the nocturnal music jungle: Here they are playing minimal techno and not heavy metal, etc.It is mainly by consuming music in specific clubs that rather distinct groups of visitors emerge, making the situation a communicative interplay of various actors."The clubbers consume each other -the clubbing crowd contains both the producers and the consumers of the experience and the clubbers are consuming a crowd of which they are a part; the club space comes to resemble a scene 'in which everyone is at once both actor and spectator'" (Malbon 1998: 277).
Besides the central media product, music, there are other media offered in the various clubs.And these media are important in subsequent communications: the flyer about the next party the same evening, the schedules of the other clubs, the posters of the coolest concerts, the visuals, or the flickering television screens with music clips, movies or announcements of upcoming events.
In the way these media products are made available, we can see how the disconnection of production from consumption, in the course of role differentiation (as noted by Kai-Uwe Hellmann [2004]), is turned upside down when the distinction company / household is made.In the club, producer and consumer become completely intertwined in individual persons.While still a consumer (for example) of a long drink, one is already in subsequent communication a producer in the form of a DJ, dancer, or storyteller.In short, clubs appear to be almost typical hubs for what Hellmann (2004: 146) calls second-order consumption in the marketplace of subtle differences: Consumption culture is thus characterized by a replication of needs and wishes, which successively undermine every expectation of resistance and finiteness and which increasingly move the moment of fantasy and stimulation into the foreground of orientation (Hellmann 2004: 151).
What would probably have to be discussed is Hellmann's suggestion that we no longer talk about subcultures but more generally about consumption culture since the first term is not confronted by a dominant culture: What speaks, however, against speaking at all about subcultures of consumption is the lack of a dominant culture without which there can be no subcultures.Because what nearly all forms of consumption we encounter nowadays have in common is that they involve second-order consumption.This is evident especially with Harley-Davidson riders, who are thoroughly acting in front of an audience, of the ingroup as well as the outgroup.To that extent, all (sub)cultures of consumption reflect at once this central feature of the prevailing consumption culture.For this reason, it is clear that we should be talking about consumption cultures, just as on the production side we are talking about company cultures (Hellmann 2004: 153).
Along with Storey (2003aStorey ( , 2003b)), Schrage (2003) and Jacke (2004), we could introduce this dominance in the form of mass media and mass culture "as a compensatory means of preventing a potential revolution, as a cultural dislocation, or as a cultural democratization" (Schrage 2003: 66).Within this dominance, however, reorderings are again possible.And even the sociologist of space, Martina Löw (2001Löw ( , 2008)), confirms in her pioneering studies that the spatial creation of specific institutionalized order(ing)s is an event that runs counter to the dominant culture and is thus countercultural.Particularly with regard to music clubs, such subcultural "spatializations" [Verräumungen] are fundamental; particularly these are constantly working on the spatial, social and communicative inclusion and exclusion of certain groups.
Especially with respect to socialization in clubs, there is the matter of being there ("in the house!") or being outside ("out of bounds!").This boundary is mediated by clothing, sounds, drugs, and (if nothing else) the bouncer.Within these consumption cultures, there are (in Hellmann's sense) very likely subcultural as well as countercultural groups that are quite easy to identify, which distinguish themselves from each other or also from whatever is mainstream, thus actualizing themselves themselves in the course of the movement itself.Hence, the Love Parade in Berlin, at one time a demonstration, has been differentiated as a changing club into a commercialized large-scale event ("alone together").In reaction to it, there are individualizing markets from which we can distinguish some smaller counter-movements with stronger group character, such as the Fuck Parade or Hate Parade.The playful rivalries go on to become further differentiated in suband main branches within cultures of consumption. 13 For precisely these changes, clubs are essential observational platforms.How resistant, for example, a musical style and (in relation to it) a club itself can be 338 Culture Unbound, Volume 1, 2009 depends on the management of latently changing products by the music industry as well as the expressed needs of club visitors.In short, everything depends on differences in popular-social trends. 14Consumers in clubs appear especially oriented to consuming consumption as a presentation platform for the self and the collective: It is here, in this creation of a space of their town, that we find resistance, not as a struggle with a dominant, hegemonic culture ... or even as the fact of clubbing itself, but resistance as located in the most minute subtleties of clubbing, the ways of clubbing -its arts de faire (Malbon 1998: 280).
If, following de Certeau (1988), we look at these kinds of everyday (consumption) activities as potentially subversive on the micro-political level, then we can understand Malbon's argumentation (not atypical for Cultural Studies) that there are uprisings on the small scale.Clubs seem predestined for such alliances and struggles.There identities that are collectively oriented and individually constructed can repeatedly be tried out and tried on in a playful manner.In the club, as a space full of signs and itself a sign, everything begins with the "I" on the dance floor (see Bonz 2006) -and, going beyond Malbon's arguments, not only on a small scale such as dancing to a single song, but also in continuously constructing both one's own and the group's identity. 15 Music clubs, as we can maintain provisionally and generally, are third places where consumption and communication are regularly taking place in very different ways, although both types of activity are motivated by media products around the nucleus of music.At the same time, there is both a trend to serialize music clubs, thus building in every town or county a regional disco, making it predictable and available, as well as an opposing trend of opening individual, highly specialized clubs for a short time (and sometimes illegally), where it is not at all clear to outsiders what exactly goes on in these places.Each one clearly has a different clientele.But especially in contrast to the domestic consumption of music in the living room, both possibilities appear to possess high levels of ritualization and physical presence.These "generate effects of a corporeal grammaticalization (a limited number of rules producing an infinity of forms, all of which share certain basic characteristics)", as the literary scholar Hans U. Gumbrecht (1998: 202) has observed concerning the consumption of American football in the stadium and on television.Gumbrecht's reflections can be applied both to music clubs as well as to football stadiums, 16 thus addressing our second example of popular-cultural third places.

The Football Stadium
The link with ritual in Gumbrecht's argument and with the productivity of fans in Storey's and Malbon's thinking is made in the following detailed passage by Roman Horak (2004: 56f.), the Austrian scholar of culture and the sociology of art, in reference to Chas Critcher's (1976) early social-scientific studies on "supporters" (football fans) in the 1970s: In terms of football, a member of the supporters . . . is classically someone who sympathizes and suffers with his club in victory and defeat.To him, it is not just a familiar ritual (though it is also that) to attend regularly the games of "his" club on site (at the stadium); it is also one of his obligations.Yet he sees the players of "his" club as equally obligated, if not to win every game then at least to do everything possible for the success of the common institution (of the "Rapid" [working-class football club in Vienna, CJ], for example) and to make the greatest possible effort.The customer, however, is someone who is not familiar with a club that he says he belongs to.To him, the main thing is a great game, some action in the Fankurve [the section with the wildest fans, CJ] or -perhaps -the atmosphere in the football stadium.If not granted what he wishes for, he can switch clubs, sports or his leisure behavior in general. . . .For the consumer, the spectacle of football is one among many; the disappointment experienced by customers is not something he knows, other than at best dissatisfaction with the product offered.He makes choices -if at all possible -according to rational categories.
The distinction first made by Critcher and taken up here by Horak between fans, customers, and consumers can be applied to current observations in football stadiums, such as those of the German National Football League [Bundesliga].The visitor type of fan, the classical "kutte wearing fan" [Kuttenträger-Fan] 17 is being pushed aside by new types of visitors such as families and business customers, who are becoming increasingly important to the marketing departments of the clubs. 18Overall, the way we deal with football has changed, as described for example by Horak (2004: 57).Football has long since become a part of popular culture, 19 and in this respect, the stadium is also a place of communication, of media production (as a space full of signs and itself a sign) and, in general, of intermediality [das Dazwischen].
Just like music and sound in the club, the game in the stadium also forms both the frame and center of the atmospheric: "In fact, the events on the pitch, in the grandstands and in the media behave like a foreign body against the background of our cultural and political institutions.It is a strange world in the midst of our everyday life" (Gebauer 2006: 9).Here, too, visitors are immersed in a completely different environment in which they can try on -and try out -many things.Here, too, identities are performed even if they are more clearly defined than in the club. 20Otherwise, we are falling into the role of the unpopular neutral or undecided observer -"The main thing is a great game!" In temporal terms, the premier league matches (as is well-known) mainly occur on Saturday afternoon -right between the beginning of the weekend / last workday of the week and Sunday as a family day.Materially and spatially, football stadiums are the intermediality [das Dazwischen] between living room, bar and sports pitch.And socially, they operate as institutions between players / clubs and fans / spectators as well as between family, friends, fans and foes: "What?You're a Bayern fan?" 340 Culture Unbound, Volume 1, 2009 Horak (2004: 61ff.)speaks of three different games that are taking place when one is watching a football game: the actual game, the game on the grandstand and the televised game.The interaction between these three levels helps results in the formation of temporary "communities" and a sense of active participation on the part of fans, customers and consumers: Here [when attending a football match in the stadium, CJ], between mutual joy or outrage, shared sorrow, despair and hope (on the one hand) and ironic detachment or self-distancing (on the other), there are small private spheres fed by two sources: the certainty of a time limit -a game does not last much longer than 90 minutes -and the shared hope of being able collectively to shape the game on the green pitch (Horak 2004: 60f.).
In the football stadium, new trends become visible among fans.In addition, this place is both a reflection of and a trendsetter for larger societal developments between subversion and commercialization.The good old stadium is full of stories that have to be discovered [gefunden], or at least re-covered [wieder-gefunden] in their commercialized manifestation: 21 "What is businesslike organizes the framework in which private emotions can thrive.Football today is a business world, inside of which emotions seethe" (Gebauer 2006: 133).These feelings as well as the actions that articulate them are increasingly stimulated by media products.
The major attention in the football stadium may still hinge on the ball and the players.Yet there are, especially in the new arenas, more and more media products before, after, and during the game.On closer inspection, the following three aspects fulfill the functions already named in the case of the music club:

Narrative machines and the prompting of subsequent communications:
From a club's magazine to fan merchandise, from jerseys to the big screen / scoreboard, stories are narrated and repeated, such as those about a club's tradition ("Borussia Moenchengladbach") or the stars ("Michael Ballack to Chelsea?").Yet besides the image-building associated with them, these stories also motivate the buying of more tickets, fan memorabilia and ultimately the products or services of sponsors.
2. Communicative relief: At the same time, media products tied to a club and its players provide relief from unreasonable communicative demands.People are basically in agreement, and nothing requires a great deal of negotiation, even if one must agree to disagree.In addition, attending a football game in the stadium can be a release (to a certain extent) from social labeling -"here I can let it all hang out!" 3. Social Orientation: Lastly, in the football stadium as well, complexity is greatly reduced by the game along with its intertwined media products.
And communication is ritualized: we know that there is one's own, the other team, and the (as already noted) less pleasurable option of staying neutral.
Against this background, consumption and the socialization associated with it takes place on different levels of consumption cultures."Even if the football community is a distorting mirror, it shows the contours of social formations that allow experiences of self and community to emerge that are different from those in ordinary life" (Gebauer 2006: 63).Football, this means, is popular culture.
Unlike feared, the individual does not disappear either in the Allianz Arena or in the Love Parade.The spectators, customers and consumers -and certainly the fans -are concerned with the articulation of the self and less with its disappearance.In the stadium as in the club, the articulation of the individual always takes place in groups and is communicated through signs and symbols, which is why it is socially monitored.For this reason, every attempt (including even the most risky) at trying out a new role, every impulsive acting out of repressed emotions, takes place in a safe setting.Again, this has not been lost in the wake of the ongoing commercialization of football, in spite of all the prophecies of doom.
In the stadium itself, there are a variety of possibilities for realizing oneself individually and being integrated socially (see Legnaro/Birenheide 2005).Besides the traditional division into football players and spectators, (in a sense) into actors on the stage and recipients in the audience as well as into the familiar us versus them -and hence into various supporter and fan groups (not by chance, people used to speak of fan communities), there are additional differentiations within and across groups.What twenty years ago distinguished specific groups of fans in Bundesliga stadiums -standing room or in seats, single-or season-ticket holders or groups in bulk seating -is now even more strongly distinguished by different areas in the new arenas.Between normal seating and VIP lounge areas (including full service meals), there are more than subtle differences.The customers and consumers mentioned by Critcher and Horak appear to have access to other areas within the stadium than the fans.
As a result, the stadium audience today coalesces only rarely into a community as in the case of the 2006 World Cup -"Thank you, Germany!" Furthermore, the stadium as a third place increasingly offers space for very different motives to communicate.No longer does the arena -as Gunter Gebauer (2006) describes it with surprising nostalgia in his "poetics of football" -belong to the fans.By means of fan representatives, blogs, and other initiatives, these express themselves (even protest) against the expropriation of "their" football by commercialization on the part of club leadership, sponsors and the stadium management. 22It was not just a ticket shortage during the aforementioned World Cup that led the often talked about "public viewings" of the games to become a new form of collectivity to those football fans and friends who were left outside (see Rötzer 2006): Sports and the media are ... linked in a special way, by requiring or generating a technological means of mass dissemination that increasingly compress social communication.The same applies to early printing and photography, then (to a great extent) for film, radio, television and (more recently) the Internet (Leggewie 2006: 114f.).These media products have not for a long time been just about football itselfstadiums are enormous narrative machines (see Legnaro/Birenheide 2005): A new stadium as a gigantic entertainment machine for the whole family, for the whole weekend if possible.According to this concept, football is only the occasion for multimedia recreation in one's free time -for entertainment products, sale of memorabilia, for advertising and "experience shopping ".In an architecture completely focused on emotions, the ideal of the shopping mall predominates, for which many spectators are needed with a lot of money and a lot of enthusiasm (Gebauer 2006: 131).
In their presentations [Inszenierungen], stadiums, clubs and of course playersin the meantime, even referees and spectators -become part of the presentation [Inszenierung] and ultimately a brand: "The Red Devils from the Betzenberg."Yet this has nothing to do with passivity on the part of spectators: "From football and popular culture, young people obtain experiences of voluntarily assumed obligations even if these make a superficial and ridiculous impression on their environment" (Gebauer 2006: 111).In consideration of these obligations, real (but also imaginary) communities develop out of many individual egos by means of cognitive, communicative and (very importantly) affective negotiations.These consolidations happen on the spot and are "live on TV".But they cannot take place on site or "live on TV" in cases of "public viewing" at home in the living room or when recounting past games.
Even football stadiums, we can confirm at this point, are "third places" in which consumption and communication transpire differently today than in the past.And football stadiums also generate unique events in series.Furthermore, the new, large arenas (particularly) represent places where an organizational balancing act takes place between originality and seriality.Much here appears to be organized in a highly professional manner, clearly foreseeable and ritualized, and yet every game is a new and completely unpredictable one.The next opposing team can be the occasion for unplanned surprises, just as the next DJ can make a night at the music club completely different from the last.

Conclusion
The socializing of individuals via communication and consumption ought to be undeniable for the two examples discussed here of clubs and stadiums.Communication, consumption, and socialization are changing in these places precisely to the extent that these places themselves are also changing in the course of their ongoing commercialization.However, this "structural and symbolic transformation of third places" does not automatically lead to a comprehensive loss of func-Notes tion or even the disappearance of these places as prophesied by Oldenburg.The representations discussed above should have made clear what Oldenburg's third places and so-called "non-places" have in common.In both, room for play in perception and action is enlarged and restricted, although in the case of non-places those spaces are clearly made standard and anonymous (temporally, materially, and socially).
Do music clubs and stadiums of today somehow represent the other "culturally pessimistic" side of the media coin, the predecessors of which were less standardized, more intimate places with "better" opportunities for socialization?"No" would be the preliminary answer: Neither standardization nor mediatization destroy these places.And the individuals and groups who visit them cannot fundamentally be understood as cheerful but unreflective consumers in the sense of Mathias Stuhr's "cheerful economy" (2003).
The media revolutionize third places.Yet they do away with them just as little as they do away with (often criticized) commerce, instead making them "only" more into what they always already were: places of entertainment, communication, consumption and socialization.An earlier German-language version of this article appeared in: Kai-Uwe Hellmann/Guido Zurstiege (2008) (eds): Räume des Konsums.Über den Funktionswandel von Räumlichkeit im Zeitalter des Konsumismus, Wiesbaden, 159-177. 2 I am limiting myself to places that, in Böhme's sense (2001: 53), can be "sensed", places whose atmosphere and spatiality appear to us directly and which we, as observers, can experience by means of "affective concern" [affektive Betroffenheit].Current discussions on virtual worlds andmedia spaces are thus bracketed out to the greatest extent possible.For an introduction to theories of social and media spaces, see the articles in Dünne/Günzel (2006) as well as in Lindemann (2002).3 On the stage-managing [Inszenierung] of third places, see Gau (2004). 4 This definition has been worked out in diverse studies in media culture and communication (for example, cf.Jacke 2004) and appears to be productive in relation to the commercial, mass-communicative transformation of signs (for a general discussion of the idea of 'popular culture', cf.Storey 2003b).5 On delegating pleasure and consumption and the inter-passivity accompanying it to a different, more critical point of view, see the studies of Pfaller 2002 andJacke 2009a.In this connection, Weh (2004: 32)  theoretical perspective on media culture, see Liebl et al. (2005) as well as Kleiner (2005).8 On the association between music and soccer as realms of popular culture, see also Theweleit (2004) and Gebauer (2006).9 These observations are based on personal experiences and conversations with promoters, artists, referees, marketing associates, fan representatives and sponsors in seminars on club and soccer culture.The aforementioned art project "Third Places" dealt with the very similar phenomena of video games, music videos and soccer stadiums; for an introduction and theorization, see Rothauer 2004, Gau 2004, Weh 2004. 10 In cultural terms, there is a range of third places where socialization makes use of popular music; in general, see Negus 1996: 164-189, Fairchild 2008: 17-34.For an example of a street (King's Road in London) as the place of popular music, see Décharné 2006; on virtual sites, see Kibby 2006 andNakamura 2002. 11 It should be discussed to what extent the visitors of clubs and soccer stadiums contribute to the atmospheres of those places as unpaid workers and how this is calculated on the production side.On these considerations with respect to the Disneyland amusement park, another thoroughly commercialized third place, see Legnaro 2000.12 For an informative outline on the development of popular music in the framework of industrialization and urbanization, see Wicke (2001); for a concrete account of music and space, see ibid., 22ff.13 For more on "being there" [Dabeisein] in culture and its various levels, see Jacke (2004).14 Even if individualization becomes extreme and the "Pimp Generation features itself like hell" -to paraphrase a special topic of the German-language music and cultural journal De:Bug from November 2006 -people will still be marketing themselves on MySpace while nonetheless still hoping to put together a circle of friends, go out and experience a musical presence.

Christoph Jacke
For a criticism of this increasing self-mediatization, see Jacke 2009a.On visualizing music in clips and the possibilities of analyzing them, see Jacke 2009b.15 The fact that these "struggles" always involve the appropriation of local and acoustic space in a thoroughly political sense is shown in the club events of queer groups; see the contributions in Haase et al. (2005).On club culture generally, see the contributions in Redhead (1997) and in the Kunstforum International Vol.135: Cool Club Cultures.16 Proceeding from art and literature, Gumbrecht (1998: 207) discusses the dialectic between originary provocation and canonized convention in the case of sports.This thread of his discussion is particularly prevalent in discourses surrounding popular culture; see Jacke 2004.17 A kutte is a denim or leather vest, onto which the insignia of one's favorite football team and allied clubs and fan clubs has been sewn, and which (out of superstition) is worn by fans to the games.It marks and delimits them as fans, and distinguishes and demarcates them from men wearing suits, for instance.18 Yet in Weh's research, even the consumer does not exist prototypically as a set quantity but instead appears to be changeable: "Today the so-called "Gruen Transfer' signifies that instant in which a single-minded consumer looking for a certain item becomes a spontaneous consumer.It is the transformation registered in a sudden change in the person's way of moving: Purposeful walking gives way to a motion that is meandering" (Weh 2004: 36).The same applies to customers, less so to classic fans.In addition, to this day there have hardly been any studies on female football fans, who have now been observed more carefully and are regarded as a target group in Germany particularly since the 2006 World Cup.19 See, for example, the studies in Jacke/Keiner 2006, 2007. 20 On Austrian stadiums and soccer fans, see Horak's studies (1997Horak's studies ( , 2002Horak's studies ( , 2004)).21 On the overwriting of a place with a history using the example of the newly formed Times Square of London, see Gau (2004).22 In the shift from the fan in the kutte to the posh fan, we can make a noteworthy observation about soccer that Storey has made for the realm of opera (2003b).Events that used to be popular culture are increasingly being appropriated by social strata that are financially better heeled; these events are directed (or re-directed) at them and are thus in the course of time rendered elite, canonized into "high culture" events.Will the soccer stadium, then, perhaps become the opera hall of tomorrow?
(born 1968) is a Professor of Theory, Aesthetics and History of Popular Music at the University of Paderborn, Germany.Some of his recent publications are: Medien(sub)kultur.Geschichten -Diskurse -Entwuerfe (Transcript Verlag: Bielefeld 2004); Kulturschutt.Ueber das Recycling von Theorien und Kulturen (Transcript Verlag: Bielefeld 2006) and Einfuehrung in Populaere Musik und Medien (LiT Verlag: Muenster 2009). 1 maintains: "The paradoxical logic consists in the fact that it more economical for the individual to delegate feelings onto the setting of a 'Third Place' than to commit oneself emotionally."What remains is to make clear to what extent this delegating can be assessed as active and passive.6 This shift in perspective from the production to the reception side as an investigative field for research on consumption was introduced (among others) by Dichter; see Cohen/Rutsky 2005; Cubitt 2005; Trentmann 2006.In the meantime, even standard works in economics talk about the second reality of the consumer; see Kroeber-Riel/Weinberg 2003: 570ff.7 On the potentials of guerillas or protesters against communication and media, as seen from a