ABSTRACT
When people use up a great deal of time and energy in interpreting a specific text, their subsequent actions oriented to that text pose interesting problems for social scientific interpretation. Media – as a highly centralised mechanism for distributing narratives that are themselves produced in quite specific places – generate many paradoxes of place. The Sopranos tour then combined three spaces that by themselves are unproblematic: the space of general tourism, the space of media tourism, and the imaginary action-space “within” the fictional narrative that sometimes generates. A Sopranos pinball machine jokily used the mafia hierarchy to customise the path of the pinball around the table. Martin Heidegger was one of the first writers to pick up on this contradictory feature of broadcasting: radio, he argued, bring us existentially “near” to places that are distant.
