Modern Media, Modern Audiences : Mass Media and Social Engineering in the 1930s Swedish Welfare State

Abstract: The dissertation straddles the interface of mass media, social engineering and advertising in 1930s Stockholm. Its twofold objective is firstly to outline their cultural output, targeting predominantly feminine audiences. Discussions oscillate between intertextual and contextual levels, and elucidate the spaces providing the respective settings for these media. Advertising is claimed to establish spatiotemporal spheres where the everyday meets with the semi-fictional framework of films or tie-in contests, which are thereby expanded in multifarious ways. The study also argues that newsreels visualize history overlooked in canonized history writing, by providing documentary and navigatory instruments in urban milieus now lost.Secondly, the study encircles two sets of discourses underpinning the mass media of the nascent welfare state, the former encompassing advertising, hygiene and eugenics. The latter is a prismatic construction of the public ? highlighted as citizens, consumers and patients. Exhibitions and non-fiction films often encouraged spectators to compare their life projects, medical profiles and lifestyles with those of object lessons or newsreels, channeling imperatives into them by elevating their everyday experiences and concerns to issues of national importance. The methodology is partly drawn from early film and visual culture theory, partly from feminist early film scholarship on filmgoing and the problematic of feminine mobility in consumerist culture. Contrary to the conceptualization of feminine fl