Life in a car

This paper takes a sociological perspective on how the mobility provided by the car has changed the environment and social relations. I've recently taken an interest in human-machine symbiosis and how tools provide new affordances for the user. This paper addresses some of those issues:

"The car becomes an extension of the driver’s body, creating new subjectivities organized around the extraordinarily disciplined ‘driving body’ (see Freund 1993: 99; Hawkins 1986; Morse 1998).
A Californian city planner declared as early as 1930 that ‘it might be said that Southern Californians have added wheels to their anatomy’ (cited Flink 1988: 143).
The car can be thought of as an extension of the senses so that the car-driver can feel its very contours, shape and relationship to that beyond its metallic skin.
As Ihde describes: ‘The expert driver when parallel parking needs very little by way of visual clues to back himself into the small place – he “feels” the very extension of himself through the car as the car becomes a symbiotic extension of his own embodiedness’ (1974: 272).
An advert for the BMW 733i promised the ‘integration of man and machine…an almost total oneness with the car’ (quoted Hawkins 1986: 67)."

The car has some parallels to wearable computing devices in that it is mobile, becomes part of self-identity, is personalized, and affords new actions for the user.

The paper concludes that:
"Rather than trying to stifle mobility which has been the strategy until now, societies must draw on and harness the power of the democratic urge to be mobile, hybridised and inhabiting the iron cage of motorised modernity. "

Inhabiting the Car, 2003
John Urry
[Full-text pdf]