American Culture and Automobiles
Americans have been crazy about cars since they were invented in 1890. When introduced during the early 1900s, automobiles served as a more powerful and modern mode of transportation and little else. Now in present time the automobile plays a far greater role in American culture. Its popularity is due to its ability to accommodate our desire for individualism, freedom and power. The automobile embodies deep-seated cultural and emotional values that have become an important part of our American culture.
The automobile has come to play a major role in our consumer society, which has, in turn, enabled the car to become a universal experience. As America's population moved out of the cities and into the suburbs, obtaining a driver's license and purchasing that first car became a right of passage for the majority of America's youth. Today nearly every adult has a driver's license and car to drive. This helps us understand why the car is the number one choice when we need to get from place to place.
The car offers the driver a method to exercise power and control. When a driver climbs behind the wheel of a car, he is in command. The driver sees its destination, direction and speed as something determined by him. The car at this point is a motor vehicle designed to cater and respond to the driver's every whim. In this way the car also represents freedom in our massive industrialized culture. It opens the option of a quick escape to the owner and gives them the opportunity to exercise their free will. For a sense of this freedom and power, one only has to get behind the wheel of a powerful muscle car, crank up the stereo and roar off down the road.
Power and control are objects every human seeks. The car has given the average man control over his environment to a degree not accessible anywhere else in his daily routine. The automobile provides something that individuals can be comfortable in, own and slowly master. The driver has complete control over his/her speed, a speed greater than one they could achieve on their own. They have power over the temperature in the car, how there seat is adjusted and what music they listen to. This constant control gives the driver a sense of security.
However some of this freedom is taken away from us by society's need for order in America.
Flink’s Three stages of American automobile consciousness fully express the progress of the whole automobile industry. From the first model T to the automatic production, it gives me an intuitive feeling of the automobile history from a big picture. On the other hand, Kline and Pinch focus more on a certain group of people--farmers or people who live in the rural area, they use it as an entry point to talk about automobile, alone with the role and duty transition between male and
countless people have gone through in the past to gain that freedom. It comes at a price
“Americans’ Love Affair with Cars, Trucks and SUVS Continues.” USA Today. USA Today, 30 August 2003. Web. 5 January 2012.
“Automobile In American Life and Society.” Automobile In American Life and Society. N.P., n.d. Web. 16 Feb. 2014.
When I can drive a car, I can go to places where I would like to without many restrictions. For instance, I can take a yoga class that is outside of my school; I can drive to a part-time job; I can also go on a road trip with my friends. Especially when I am in college, driving seems to be necessary since the place is ginormous and the public transportation is not as convenient as cities like Boston. Without knowing how to drive, I will reduce my enthusiasm to do many of these activities because they are troublesome to get to. Even though I need to go to different places in one day, I do not feel restrained because I can rely on my personal schedule instead of worrying about to cause trouble for others.
No technology has had a greater impact on the American life than the automobile. Where we live, how we work, and how we travel, what our landscape looks like, our environment have all been shaped by the automobile. There isn’t a better place that demonstrates the social, geographic, and political changes brought by the industry than Detroit, the motor city. Detroit was situated to be a center of the American automobile industry. All of the material that was needed to build was easily accessible to the city by the great lakes waterways and by rail. The automobile industry helped people with their everyday lives and changed the way people saw the world.
...sportation, petroleum products, and in how many ways they impact and shape the world in which we live. The automobile reformed American’s views on what a proper meal was by introducing fast food chain which created a rapid increase in rates of obesity. Your wealth was only worth as much as the automobile you were driving and success was defined by your car being a Ford or a Mercedes. Although the invention of the automobile created great strife throughout American history, it is all too easy to pile all of the blame on the automobile without pointing fingers back around at society. The automobile has been embraced by countless generations and will continue to be embraced as we progress into the future. Choices come with consequences. As we move into the future, coming generations will continue to deal with consequences that begun before they were even thought about.
Wilson concludes by explaining the reason the campaign against the car will never end, “critics dislike everything the car stands for and everything society constructs to serve the needs of its occupants” (Wilson 22).
Having a driver's license means responsibility. I have always been hesitant to get a license and still am a bit because I know how much responsibility comes with one. Firstly, a car is quite dangerous. When driving a car, mistakes can be very costly, and the driver has to be well trained in order to handle those mistakes, or better yet, not make them. Secondly, there is a lot that goes into owning a car. You have to get it fueled, inspected, and keep good care of it. Having a car is almost like having a pet fish. You don't need to give it full attention, but you need to make sure it doesn't die. There is a lot of responsibility financially as well. You have to pay for things like insurance
As James Flink points out in The Automobile Age, the village store and the local banks were the businesses most vulnerable to the new competition (47). Robert E. Wood, former vice president of Sears, explains how businesses moved to the suburbs, "When the automobile reached the masses, it changed this condition [the funneling of consumers into the town centre] and made shopping mobile. In the great cities Sears located its stores well outside the main shopping districts, on cheap land, usually on arterial highways, with ample parking space (Wollen 13)." Thus city centers came to be seen as sites of congestion, whereas the surrounding areas were regarded as accessible and convenient. The rapid proliferation of shopping complexes outside of the city center in the 1950s left down town a crime-ridden wasteland of vacated stores. City centers no longer featured traditional shops; instead they contained gas stations, parking lots, and inns whose focus was on the travelers and their cars (Wollen 13).
Since the development of the steam engine people had been interested in creating self-powered vehicles, this manifested during the industrial revolution as the train. However, as time went on people became interested in creating a vehicle that wasn’t confined to tracks. The earliest attempts were moderately successful but served little practical purpose. Automobiles first began to truly spread with the invention of the electric motor which created cheaper, more powerful, and safer automobiles. Still the automobile still had numerous problems and were mainly in the hands of the rich. It was the development of the internal combustion engine and the assembly line that was truly able to create a practical vehicle that could be used by all and propelled the automobile into the heart of American culture and made it one of the most significant inventions of the post-industrial revolution era, resulting in a complete revolution of society.
The responsibility gained by having a car is monumental. There comes the responsibility of protecting yourself and other driver's lives by driving responsibly and also taking care of your car with continuous upkeep. This responsibility instills confidence in teenagers. Knowing that they can be trusted with such a responsibility creates a sense of purpose and confidence. Teens will be more "capable of handling high-pressure situations" by having the confidence gained from getting their driver's
Another thing that was aspired by Route 66 is the idea of car culture. Muscle cars, drag racing, and motor shows, were all part of this culture. Illegal drag races was a growing problem in the early 1950’s when teenages woruld speed down a quarter mile to see who was faster. Popularized by the book Hot Rod, by Gregor Felson in 1950, the phenomenon of “hot-rodding” was seen like a widespread form of youth rebellion. This is where promoters built legal drag- racing strips, where people could race their cars down the speedway without other cars interfering and watching cars with precautionary measure to prevent injury if an accident was to occur. Places like the Route 66 Raceway in Elwood, Illinois, is an example of inspired car culture business.
Driving a car and obtaining a driver’s license does perhaps seem to provide people with a great sense of independence and freedom. Teenagers need to feel independent in order to learn to become successful on their own as well as realize how to handle life situations on their own, and having a license seems the perfect start and most effective way to do so. When teenagers feel this independence they tend to act more mature, knowing the responsibilities they must now carry on their own (More4Kids). Teenagers often look forward to the freedom that driving offers as well. Teenagers are able to take drives to escape from life’s many stressed, and leave any troubles at home behind without rebelling out against their loved ones.
One of the most important advantages of owning a car is convenience. It allows you the freedom to go anywhere you want whenever you want. There is no hanging about waiting for public transport to turn up in potentially bad weather.