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The website deadmalls.com wistfully, regretfully, nostalgically documents this decline. Dan Bell produces videos of abandoned and dying malls that draw millions of views to the site’s YouTube channel. “When you go into a dead mall, it’s like shock and awe at the same time,” he says. “I think that’s really appealing for a lot of young people. It’s like watching the Titanic sink.”²³⁷

It’s not the decline of the mall or the store that captures our attention so much as the profound reconfigurations of interest of which these changes are a symptom. Nor even this, so much as to develop a grammar with which to read changes of this enormity.

The mall and the supermarket are paradigmatic sites where, in the material life of commodities, the pressure in the relation of the differential interests of seller and buyer is towards assimilation. The experience of the shopper was more or less the same, perambulating through the shared arcades or supermarket aisles, following much the same path prefigured in the ordering of products, with the same images for all to see, the same piped music, the same aromas. The missions of individual shoppers may be somewhat different, but the distractions are the same. Such are the affordances of space. There is limited scope for difference.

To the extent that there is demographic variation, in the mall it is crudely configured. A mall may have scores of stores, but there is less space for men, as stereotypically conceived by the mall, than for women.²³⁸ Men have to go elsewhere for the hardware store or the auto parts store. Nor is there space for the meagerly consuming poor, a difference marked often by race – not having a car can keep them away.

Going to the physical store, the 75,000 items in a Walmart would, you might think, allow plenty of scope for differentiation.^§AS2.2.2 But, in its attempt to be comprehensive, a Walmart can only have a few of each kind of thing, mostly cheap and Chinese-made. Meanwhile a data service provider called ScrapeHero reported that on January 4, 2017 Amazon had a total of 398,040,250 products, an 8% increase on the previous month.²³⁹ In that year, its total sales were up 30% from the year before, and in 2018 it reached 49.1% of all online retail sales in the United States, followed by eBay and Apple, leaving Walmart in fourth place for e-commerce sales at a meager 3.7%.²⁴⁰

Nobody could browse through all these items in the Amazon store, so instead of the singular and synergistic juxtaposition of items in a physical store, we find them by searching a database. This is a fundamentally different way of representing and communicating purchasable products.^§MS2.1.1c

Relational databases are neither two-dimensional (as is the store map); nor three (as is perambulating the store in architectural space). By comparison, they are non-dimensional. Each of the tables that sits behind a relational database may in the first instance be two-dimensional,^§AS1.4.6a but when tables are layered over tables and ontologies map semantic relations over tables, what we then have is an infinitely varied relationality that transcends the essential contiguities of two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional spaces.

Shopping, so transformed, is still shopping, but the affordances are different. This is a radical transposition, from in-store shopping to online. There is both a profound continuity (the commodity form as an essentially modern social frame for interest) and profound change (a shift in the program of interest from assimilation to differentiation).

Where physical stores dealt with differences in the crudest and often most frustratingly ineffective of ways, Amazon’s unit of social difference is reduced to a handful of “people like you,” and only in this miniscule respect: they are people who happen to have directed their interest for a moment to one of those four hundred million-odd use values. The database has a record of the billions of such instances of shopping, information lost to a physical store. By committing these instances to the historical record, by documenting their excruciating detail in the universal encyclopedia of shopping, online stores can switch at whim and in an instant their program for the management of market interests. If in the dynamic of the physical store, by dint of the affordances of its forms of multimodal meaning “to shop” was to assimilate, then the dynamic of the online store is to differentiate.

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²³⁶ Josh Sanburn, 2017, “Why the Death of Malls Is About More Than Shopping,” Time, July 20.

²³⁷ Ibid.

²³⁸ Paco Underhill, 2004, The Call of the Mall, New York: Simon and Schuster. pp. 97ff, 126ff.

²³⁹ www.scrapehero.com/how-many-products-are-sold-on-amazon-com-january-2017-report

²⁴⁰ https://medium.com/futuresin/amazon-owns-half-of-ecommerce-in-the-u-s-904523f7aea2

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 262–264. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

deadmalls.com §AS2.3.1a