Tag Archives: history

Will my grandchildren learn to drive? I expect not

I rarely drive these days, and when I do, it’s bloody terrifying. Even though I grew up driving and drove every day for fifteen years, my lack of practice is palpable as I grip the steering wheel. Every time I get behind the wheel, in order to silence my own fears about all of the ways in which I might crash, I ruminate over the anxieties that people have about teenagers and driving. I try not to get distracted in my own driving by looking to see if other drivers are texting while driving, but I can’t help but muse about these things. And while I was driving down the 101 in California last week, it hit me: driving is about to become obsolete.

The history of cars in America is tied up with what it means to be American in the first place. American history —with its ups and downs — can be understood through the automobile industry. In fact, it can be summed up with one word: Detroit. Once a booming metropolis, this one-industry town iconically highlights the issues that surround globalization, class inequality, and labor identities. But entwined with the very real economic factors surrounding the automobile industry is an American obsession with freedom.

It used to be that getting access to a car was the ultimate marker of freedom. As a teenager in the nineties, I longed for my sixteenth birthday and all that was represented by a driver’s license. Today, this sentiment is not echoed by the teens that I meet. Some still desperately want a car, but it doesn’t have the same symbolic feeling that it once did. When I ask teens about driving, what they share with me reveals the burdens imposed by this supposed tool of freedom. They talk about the costs — especially the cost of gas. They talk about the rules — especially the rules that limit them from driving with other teens in the car. And they talk about the risks — regurgitating back countless PSAs on drinking or texting while driving. While plenty of teens still drive, the very notion of driving doesn’t prompt the twinkle in their eyes that I knew from my classmates.

Driving used to be hard work. Before there was power steering and automatic transmission, maneuvering a car took effort. Driving used to be a gateway for learning. Before there were computers in every part of a car, curious youth could easily tear apart their cars and tinker with their innards. Learning to drive and manipulate a car used to be admired. Driving also used to be fun. Although speed limits and safety belts have saved many lives, I still remember the ways in which we would experiment with the boundaries of a car by testing its limits in parking lots on winter days. And I will never forget my first cross-country road trip, when I embraced the openness of the road and pushed my car to the limits and felt the wind on my face. Freedom, I felt freedom.

Today, what I feel is boredom, if not misery. The actual mechanisms of driving are easy, fooling me into a lull when I get into a car. Even with stimuli all around me, all I get to do is pump the gas, hit the brakes, and steer the wheel no more than ten degrees. My body is bored and my brain turns off. By contrast, I totally get the allure of the phone—or anything that would be more interesting than trying to navigate the road while changing the radio station to avoid the incessant chatter from not-very-entertaining DJs.

It’s rare that I hear many adults talk about driving with much joy. Some still get giddy about their cars; I hear this most often from my privileged friends when they get access to a car that changes their relationship to driving, such as an electric car or a hybrid or a Tesla. But even in those cases, I hear enthusiasm for a month before people go back to moaning about traffic and parking and surveillance. Outside of my friends, I hear people lament gas prices and tolls and this, that, or the other regulation. And when I listen to parents, they’re always complaining about having to drive their kids here, there, and everywhere. Not surprisingly, the teens that I meet rarely hear people talk joyously about cars. They hear it as a hassle.

So where does this end up? Data from both the CDC and AAA suggests that fewer and fewer American teens are bothering to even get their driver’s license. There’s so much handwringing about driving dangers, so much effort towards passing new laws and restrictions targeting teens in particular, and so much anxiety about distracted driving. Not surprisingly, more and more teens are throwing their hands in the air and giving up, demanding their parents drive them because there’s no other way. This, in turn, means that parents hate driving even more. And since our government is incapable of working together to invest in infrastructural investments, thereby undermining any hopes of public transit in huge parts of the country, what we’re effectively doing is laying the groundwork for autonomous vehicles. It’s been 75 years since General Motors exhibited an autonomous car at the 1939 World’s Fair, but we’ve now created the cultural conditions for this innovation to fit into American society.

We’re going to see a decade of people flipping out over fear that autonomous vehicles are dangerous, even though I expect them to be a lot less dangerous that sleepy drivers, drunken drivers, distracted drivers, and inexperienced drivers. Older populations that still associate driving with freedom are going to be resistant to the very idea of autonomous vehicles, but both parents and teenagers will start to see them as more freeing than driving. We’re still a long way from autonomous vehicles being meaningfully accessible to the general population. But we’re going to get there. We’ve spent the last thirty years ratcheting up fears and safety measures around cars, and we’ve successfully undermined the cultural appeal of driving. This is what will open the doors to a new form of transportation. And the opportunities for innovation here are only just beginning.

(This entry was first posted on May 5, 2014 at Medium under the title “Will my grandchildren learn to drive? I expect not” as part of The Message.)

Matt Wolf’s “Teenage”

Close your eyes and imagine what it was like to be a teenager in the 1920s. Perhaps you are out late dancing swing to jazz or dressed up as a flapper. Most likely, you don’t visualize yourself stuck at home unable to see your friends like today’s teenagers. And for good reason. In the 1920s, teenagers used to complain when their parents made them come home before 11pm. Many, in fact, earned their own money; compulsory high school wasn’t fully implemented until the 1930s when adult labor became anxious about the limited number of available jobs.

Although contemporary parents fret incessantly about teenagers, most people don’t realize that the very concept of a “teenager” is a 1940s marketing invention. And it didn’t arrive overnight. It started with a transformation in the 1890s when activists began to question child labor and the psychologist G. Stanley Hall identified a state of “adolescence” that was used to propel significant changes in labor laws. By the early 1900s, with youth out of the work force and having far too much free time, concerns about the safety and morality of the young emerged, prompting reformers to imagine ways to put youthful energy to good use. Up popped the Scouts, a social movement intended to help produce robust youth, fit in body, mind, and soul. This inadvertently became a training ground for World War I soldiers who, by the 1920s, were ready to let loose. And then along came the Great Depression, sending a generation into a tailspin and prompting government intervention. While the US turned to compulsory high school and the Civilian Conservation Corps, Germany saw the rise of Hitler Youth. And an entire cohort, passionate about being a part of a community with meaning, was mobilized on the march towards World War II.

All of this (and much more) is brilliantly documented in Jon Savage’s beautiful historical account Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. This book helped me rethink how teenagers are currently understood in light of how they were historically positioned. Adolescence is one of many psychological and physical transformations that people go through as they mature, but being a teenager is purely a social construct, laden with all sorts of political and economic interests.

When I heard that Savage’s book was being turned into a film, I was both ecstatic and doubtful. How could a filmmaker do justice to the 576 pages of historical documentation? To my surprise and delight, the answer was simple: make a film that brings to visual life the historical texts that Savage referenced.

In his new documentary, Teenage, Matt Wolf weaves together an unbelievable collection of archival footage to produce a breathless visual collage. Overlaid on top of this visual eye candy are historical notes and diary entries that bring to life the voices and experiences of teens in the first half of the 20th century. Although this film invites the viewer to reflect on the past, doing so forces a reflection on the present. I can’t help but wonder: what will historians think of our contemporary efforts to isolate young people “for their own good”?

This film is making its way through US independent theaters so it may take a while until you can see it, but to whet your appetite, watch the trailer:

 

(This entry was first posted on April 25, 2014 at Medium under the title “A Dazzling Film About Youth in the Early 20th Century” as part of The Message.)

how “context collapse” was coined: my recollection

Various academic folks keep writing to me asking me if I coined “context collapse” and so I went back in my record to try to figure it out. I feel the need to offer up my understanding of how this term came to be in an artifact that is more than 140 characters since folks keep asking anew. The only thing that I know for certain is that, even if I did (help) coin the term, I didn’t mean to. I was mostly trying to help explain a phenomenon that has long existed and exists in even more complicated ways as a result of social media.

In 2002, I wrote a thesis at the MIT Media Lab called “Faceted Id/entity” that drew heavily on the works of Erving Goffman and Joshua Meyrowitz. In it, I wrote an entire section talking about “collapsed contexts” and I kept coming back to this idea (descriptively without ever properly defining it). My thesis was all about contexts and the ways of managing identity in different contexts. I was (am) absolutely in love with Meyrowitz’s book “No Sense of Place” which laid out the challenges of people navigating multiple audiences as a result of media artifacts (e.g., stories around vacation photos).

Going back through older files, I found powerpoints from various talks that I gave in 2003 and 2004 that took the concept of “collapsed contexts” to Friendster to talk about what happened when the Burners and gay men and geeks realized they were on the site together. And an early discussion of how there are physical collapsed contexts that are addressed through the consumption of alcohol. In a few of my notes in these, I swapped the term to “context collapse” when referring to the result but I mostly used “collapsed contexts.”

Articles that I was writing from 2005-2008 still referred to “collapsed contexts.” (See: Profiles as Conversation and Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8, and my dissertation.) My dissertation made “collapsed contexts” a central concept.

In 2009, Alice Marwick and I started collaborating. She was fascinated by the arguments I was making in my dissertation on collapsed contexts and imagined audiences and started challenging me on aspects of them through her work on micro-celebrity. She collected data about how Twitter users navigated audiences and we collaborated on a paper called “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience” which was submitted in 2009 and finally published in 2011. To the best that I can tell, this is the first time that I used “context collapse” instead of “collapsed contexts” in published writing, but I have no recollection as to why we shifted from “collapsed contexts” to “context collapse.”

Meanwhile, in 2009, Michael Wesch published an article called “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam” that goes back to Goffman. While we ran in the same circles, I’m not sure that either one of us was directly building off of the other but we were clearly building off of common roots. (Guiltily, I must admit that I didn’t know about or read this article of his until much later and long after Alice and I wrote our paper. And I have no idea whether or not he read my papers where I discussed “collapsed contexts.”)

When I refer to context collapse now, I often point back to Joshua Meyrowitz because he’s the one that helped that concept really click in my head, even if he didn’t call it “collapsed contexts” or “context collapse.” As with many academic concepts, I see the notion of “context collapse” as being produced iteratively through intellectual interaction as opposed to some isolated insight that just appeared out of nowhere. I certainly appreciate the recognition that I’ve received for helping others think about these issues, but I’m very much hand-in-hand with and standing on the shoulders of giants.

If others have more insights into how this came into being, please let me know and I will update accordingly!

history of social network sites (a work-in-progress)

As many of you know, Nicole Ellison and I are guest editing a special issue of JCMC. As a part of this issue, we are writing an introduction that will include a description of social network sites, a brief history of them, a literature review, a description of the works in this issue, and a discussion of future research. We have decided to put a draft of our history section up to solicit feedback from those of you who know this space well. It is a work-in-progress so please bear with us. But if you have suggestions, shout out.

history of social network sites (a work-in-progress)

In particular, we want to know: 1) Are we reporting anything inaccurately? 2) What are we missing?