Shelter news: affordance, place and proximity in news media representations of civil defence artefacts

Abstract

Sweden has a system of 64,000 air-raid shelters. Built over a period of 80 years and providing protection for about 70% of the population, the shelters have taken on a special role in the country’s public setting. Their omnipresence has made them sociocultural symbols in Swedish society. However, while the origins of air-raid-shelter symbolism are well researched within historical studies, little is known about the role shelters play in media settings today. While the air-raid shelters originate from a highly militarized past, contemporary mediations do not necessarily follow this heritage. In this cross-disciplinary article, the role of air-raid shelters in Swedish news-media reporting in 2015 to 2018 is studied in an effort to understand how sociocultural interpretations of air-raid shelters are produced and mediated in news-media settings, and how such interpretations are spread and reproduced throughout the media sphere. Inspired by research stemming from historical studies, STS (Science and Technology Studies), and media and communication, the article shows that news-media reporting on air-raid shelters is highly flexible, yet limited to a set of afforded interpretations that sometimes exist parallel to each other. The article also discusses how journalists’ and commentators’ use of ‘proximity’ and ‘place’ interplays with the existence and abundance of shelters in local settings. In sum, the findings highlights the air-raid shelters function as a projection surface for moral debates in public media, but also that abundance of shelters in urban settings do not guarantee that discussions will concern air-raid shelters actual function as a risk reducing technology.