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Car Culture
See
Car Culture.
- Cars as embodiments of particular lifestyles, aspirations to those lifestyles (e.g. Celebrity, freedom).
- Disillusionment with cars and associated metaphors (e.g. alienation, "Some things hurt more than cars and girls", "We're on a road to nowhere").
- Cars and teen tragedy (e.g. "Round the track they drove at a deadly pace").
- At times extremely superficial (clueless?) use of this material by people promoting cars and car culture (step forward Mobil, although Mercedes Benz once managed to misappropriate a Janis Joplin song in a particularly unreflective advertising campaign).
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Car Culture: An Academic Survey
See also
Academic literature for a review of journals.
- Majority of books on Car Culture shaped by concerns of disciplines:
- Gender
- Subcultures
- Representation of cars and consumers in advertising
- Uses that people make of cars
- Histories of the car industry -- obviously, all the above often include historical contextualization and detail but histories of industrial relations and economics seem to take up a separate category.
- Not all that much on VEC/ mobile media -- paradoxical considering pt. 4 (uses)
Although much of the work is quite cogently argued, methodologies tend to be a little fuzzy. In particular, we often seen individual cases rather than statistically rigorous sampling strategies--one might even accuse some of these works of being anecdotal. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but one does wonder what conclusions we can really draw from many of the pieces. Further, as one reviewer suggests, the current nature of much academic publishing (collections of individual papers, loosely bound together by a theme rather than more rigidly organized books) does not always guarantee consistent quality.
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Customize Your Car Online
- Webpages for many auto-manufacturers now include some kind of online customization "toy" for people to play around with
- We know from interviews to date that people prefer pre-sales customization to tinkering with the car after buying it
- We also know that although people might want to personalize their car, they do so with an eye to how this will affect re-sale further down the line
- Some cars seem to lend themselves to pre-sale customization more easily -- especially the Mini and the Smart Car
- On the other hand -- might auto-manufacturers not want to cultivate the "cute" factor of the above (a Jaguar is a much more "serious" car than a Mini, and this is part of its appeal)
- Not all sites allow people to order their new car "designing" it
- Some sites appear to be much more "fun" to use. They feature:
- Larger images of the car -- you can see the impact of your choices more clearly
- This applies as much to the interior as the exterior
- Limited delays between making a selection and seeing the results -- the best examples use Flash video
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MTV's Pimp My Ride
This MTV show enhances poor, road unworthy cars with the latest and greatest in mobile media. Young kids, usually students or young professionals aged 18-22 from southern California give over their cars to West Coast Customs who proceed to sink $15,000 - $30,000 worth of custom paint, wheels and every interior gadget ever desired. The catch is that all this work is superficial: no mechanical repairs were made on these cars, although many of them need substantial repairs. It is this superficiality that caught my attention because it seems to personify Los Angeles and the Hollywood-style. The emphasis is about exterior looks and not the mechanics. See
Media- what’s on the shelves.
MTV's Pimp My Ride
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The New Yorker
Summaries: Social Anxieties re: technology and cars
- Technology is solving the wrong problems
- Useless technology
- Covenience not always so convienent
- Interests and needs change with lifestyle, but nostalgia/lust for certain cars remain
- People are getting too absorbed in technology
The New Yorker
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NASCAR
Summaries: Catering to gas guzzling performance, power and speed
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Soundscapes
- People use mobile music tech (the Walkman and the Car Stereo) to manage their experiences of the world around them
- This includes
- Maintaining a mood
- Setting a desired mood
- Using a film soundtrack to remind themselves of a film/ imagining themselves in that film
- Remembering an event in their lives linked to a song
Consequently:
- People reclaim time that social scientists have traditionally claimed is "wasted"/ non-productive time
- Even in a traffic jam, people can be engaged in meaningful activity
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Posted at Jun 17/2005 07:53AM:
David Platt: I'm going to put the summaries in the 'key pages' listing and then consider the best way to set them up. One page with lots of internal links, or lots of mini-pages grouped in this category? I'm leaning towards the former, myself ...
Do users have a preference?
In the meantime, please post summary lists at the top of your topic page/ interview page so that these are the first thing that viewers see on loading the page. Thanks in advance.
Posted at Jun 21/2005 07:41PM:
Serena: I'm sorry David but I can't figure this out. I tried to link the summary from Pimp My Ride to this page but I couldn't get it to work. Any suggestions?? Cheers.
Posted at Jun 26/2005 06:57PM:
David Platt: Sorry for the delay in dealing with this, Serena. Is this what you wanted?
