In this article, I consider how the redesign of vehicle dashboards has restructured car-related data processes. I do so by charting the emergence of two such processes enabled by the redesign of vehicle dashboards: firstly, the transformation of ‘geodata’ into ‘navigational data’ with the integration of voice-activated navigation systems into vehicle dashboards, and secondly, the transformation of ‘vehicle data’ into ‘driving data’ in the convergence, and customization, of dashboard features and functionality. Both transformations are enabled through strategic design decisions, persuading (...) drivers to participate in novel practices they might otherwise not. Firstly, in that voice-activation is depicted as a seamless, unmediated interface between the normal, natural speech of a driver, and the vehicle itself. Secondly, through the strategy of control, the driver is persuaded to believe they have full customizable power within, and of, the vehicle. The systems discussed here – a voice-activated navigation system built on the What3words platform, and a ‘widescreen’ dashboard in a range of Mercedes-Benz vehicles – are representative of broader efforts within the automotive industry to cultivate a newly ‘datafied’ driving experience. (shrink)

This article makes the case for including frameworks of media ecology and mobilities research in the shaping of critical robotics research for a human-centered and holistic lens onto robot technologies. The two meta-disciplines, which align in their attention to relational processes of communication and movement, provide useful tools for critically exploring emerging human–robot dimensions and dynamics. Media ecology approaches human-made technologies as media that can shape the way we think, feel, and act. Relatedly, mobilities research highlights various kinds of influential (...) movement and stillness of people, things, and ideas. The emerging field of critical robotics research can benefit from such attention to the ways of thinking, feeling, and moving robotic forms and environments encourage and discourage. Drawing on various studies into robotics, I illustrate those conceptual alignments of media ecology, mobilities, and critical robotics research and point to the value of this interdisciplinary approach to robots as media and robotics as socio-cultural environments. (shrink)

Festival is a performative dimension of cultural praxis that strengthens bonds of cohesion in society. Festivals are also an integral part of religious praxis. They have the potentiality of bringing its adherents and non-adherents together thus creating and sustaining social communion among them. This reality of sustaining social communion confirms an important function of religion in society with particular reference to its social integrative effects. Therefore, this article assesses how religious festival, Christmas, fosters social integration among Igbos in Nigeria. On (...) a related note, many Igbos, see Christmas festival as unique occasion for them to visit their communities; attend meetings of their associations and/or town unions and consolidate family ties. These are opportunities for building social integrations, otherwise denoted as social communion in this research. This work makes use of critical analysis of relevant texts and questionnaire survey methods as means of gathering materials and data for this research. In view of understanding how Christmas festival aids social communion among the Igbo ethnic group, the theories of structural functionalism, social capital and social integration are being utilised as theoretical frameworks for this study. Finally, this study avers that religious festival cements social communion between the Igbos in Calabar Metropolis and their ancestral communities. (shrink)

This article illustrates the process of applied critical realist research using a case study of political decision-making in transport. Critical realism is often used to analyse socio-political cha...

The material interrelations between bodies and objects are a wide, worthwhile and absorbing field, which has not been sufficiently examined yet. Focusing on such interrelations within air travel, this article contributes to the exploration of this field. It delineates that such interrelations do not simply happen, but that they have to be accomplished continuously by different participants with a certain risk to fail at many points. Within mobilities, such processes of interrelating occur under the specific circumstances of a moving vehicle. (...) Based on empirical data from an ethnographic study on air travel, the paper is concerned with the ongoing dynamics of body-object-interrelations. Based on this analysis, it suggests emphasizing the continuous modification that material assemblages built of people and objects undergo even when “only” staying immobile during a flight. Passengers do not simply enter and exit a vehicle staying identical with themselves. Rather, they are continuously adapting to a material infrastructure that shapes and adjusts their corporeal needs and capacities, including their senses. (shrink)

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the world, which cannot be seen as making driving (including freeways, motorways and autobahns) a uniform experience of movement in a controlled 'no-place' space. Yet, there clearly is an increasingly (...) globalizing car system, conceptualized as a powerful socio-economic and technological complex which sustains the car as a key object of mass production (Fordism) and mass consumption, which has impacted on spatial organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls and demands new forms of social life, sociability and time-space flexibility. This automobile system currently accounts for some 1.2 million deaths through traffic accidents a year world-wide, with the reversal of the long normalization of this form of 'mass murder,' now seen as a key topic for public health authorities. At the same time while it is potentially possible to subject cars to greater surveillance and systemic control through information technology, this in itself may not automatically lead to a reduction of accidents. In recent years the car has become a complex communicative platform for multi-tasking, a command centre for telephone, television, Internet etc., a place of work and instrumental tasking; but also a place of dwelling and refuge, a comfort zone for emotional decontrol via the sound system. Something which requires a more flexible driving habitus in which the senses are reconfigured and extended through the technology, as driving increasingly depends on the software as we move to intelligent cars and roads. Yet this is also something which generates an expanding set of new risks. The logic is for the driver to become the auto pilot and the automobile to become a sort of datasuit wrap. Yet it is not surprising that this view of the controlled safe car should also summon up its opposite: the car as dangerous and powerful, as a vehicle for excitement and speed. Especially so given that car racing practically originated alongside the birth of the automobile and is now itself a massive global industry whose imagery is central to the marketing of many types of cars. (shrink)

With the increasingly powerful functions of vehicle-mounted entertainment facilities, people like to listen to music while driving to render different atmospheres and emotions. However, emotions are important factors affecting drivers’ decisions, behavior and may reduce drivers’ hazard perception, even promote dangerous driving behaviors of drivers. The purpose of this study is to explore the young and elderly drivers in assessing the HP difference under different emotional states. We conducted a 3 × 2 mixed experimental design with emotion as a within-participants (...) variable and age as a between-participants factor. A sample of 14 young drivers and 13 elderly drivers completed the HP self-assessment of road traffic warning signs under negative emotion, neutral emotion, and positive emotion, randomly. The results showed that the young had the highest self-assessment HP under the negative emotion arousal condition, while the old had the highest self-assessment HP under the positive emotion arousal condition. In addition, When both groups were in a positive arousal state, the older group perceived more hazards than the young group. The results could help designers create driving emotions suitable for different driver groups, thus improving their perception of hazards and reducing risky driving. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the mobilities turn and its studies of the performativity of everyday (im)mobilities enable new forms of sociological inquiry, explanation and engagement. New kinds of researchable entities arise, opening up a new or rediscovered realm of the empirical, and new avenues for critique. The mobilities paradigm not only remedies the academic neglect of various movements, of people, objects, information and ideas. It also gathers new empirical sensitivities, analytical orientations, methods and motivations to examine important social (...) and material phenomena and fold social science insight into responses. After an outline of the mobilities paradigm, this article provides a wide-ranging review of emergent `mobile methods' of studying (im)mobilities. We discuss some of the new researchable entities they engender and explore important implications for the relationship between the empirical, theory, critique, and engagement. (shrink)

Much of the debate on sustainability is predicated on the belief that environmental demands lead to the production of sustainable technologies that induce environmental benefits. This fails to account for the influential ways technologies are used in practice, and the interactions between users and technologies that shape their environmental effects. This article uses the example of how cars and their drivers together accomplish the practice of driving through their interactions with each other, and explores the implications this has for generating (...) environmental outcomes. We draw on a body of literature that argues how together, users and technologies participate in carrying out practices that actively shape outcomes, and we show how and why this applies to sustainability. The article presents the case of the Toyota Prius, analyzing Toyota's intent in designing a sustainable car and contrasting it with the perspectives of thirty-eight of its drivers. We find that the possibility for fuel and carbon reduction is coproduced and is a result of complex interactions between technology, drivers, and driving practice. (shrink)

Following aluminum as part of a material culture of speed and lightness, this article examines how assemblages of energy and metals connect built environments, ways of life, and ideologies of acceleration. Aluminum can be theorized as a circulatory matrix that forms an energy culture. Through a discussion of speed and social justice, the history of aluminium-based socioecologies reveals how the materiality of energy forms assemblages of objects, infrastructures, and practices. The article then traces the aluminum industry’s involvement in the production (...) and distribution of energy itself both at the national scale of power grids and in the emergence of transnational transfers of energy, such as hydropowered smelters in Iceland. Finally, this analysis of deeply embedded energy cultures calls for a transnational approach to the accelerated socioecologies of aluminum production and consumption; and for energy transition theories to pay closer attention to the figured worlds and figuring work of the military-industrial complex. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th-century three technologies had emerged as sources of motive power for the automobile: steam, internal combustion, and electric motors. In 1900, in the United States and around the world, each of these powered a roughly equal number of automobiles. Thus, the early period of automobile development offers fertile ground for the study of technological path choice. At that time, it appeared that the electric motor was poised to become the dominant automotive technology. However, the internal (...) combustion engine achieved this status instead. Although a large number of studies have examined the history of the automobile with a view to determining the reasons for the emergence of the internal combustion engine as the dominant technology for the car engine, no consensus has emerged of what the critical factors were. A close reexamining of the history allows us to identify the years 1900-1904 as the period during which the automobile’s technological path was determined. A review of the conditions prevailing during this period and the stages of development of the sociotechnical systems in which each of the alternative automotive technologies was embedded helps us identify the aspiration for touring as the key factor fixing the path for the technological development of the automobile from that point on. (shrink)