Driving and ‘Passengering’: Notes on the Ordinary Organization of Car Travel (paper, 2008) (original) (raw)

Inhabiting the Family-Car: Children-Passengers and Parents-Drivers on the School Run

2012

Inspired by recent advances in the field of automobility, this article explores how families inhabit cars, and how daily automobilized family routines are accomplished interactionally in and through cars’ uniquely structured inner space(s). Following Urry’s (2006) notion of the “socially inhabited car,” the article assumes sociological and ethnomethodological sensibilities and sensitivities in researching in-car interactions. Specifically, a single strip of a familial dispute that takes place in the car on a routine trip to school is studied. The audiovisual data was taken from recordings of five urban families living in Jerusalem, Israel, during daily trips to school. A camcorder was supplied to the passengers — children of elementary school age — which served as a mobile recording device that captured the car’s interior spaces and the interactions therein. Studying up-close verbal and gestural interactions reveals how family members, including driver (in the front seat) and passengers (in both the front and back seats), make use of the unique material design of the car’s inner spaces as semiotic resources for communication and for affiliating and disaffiliating with the overall argumentative interaction. The article illuminates how an immediate physical context, in the shape of the car’s interior, acts simultaneously as a material given and as a socially emergent or accomplished semiotic environment.

Meaning in motion: Sharing the car, sharing the drive

This paper is the editors' introduction to the special issue. The special issue is concerned with talk and activity inside cars, with examining the interior of a car as socially rich and meaningful. News items, in different forms of media, regularly report on the negative impact of passengers on driving, or the use of cell/mobile phones and GPS navigators in cars, or sometimes even unusual behavior inside cars. Headlines and stories almost always encourage the perception of the car interior as a site of exceptional activity and marked emotional behavior, and as a place in which technology use can become problematic and increase the likelihood of accident. By implication, the ways in which people live their ordinary everyday and non-exceptional lives in cars seem less worthy of focus and too trivial to make the news. Despite all this, there is currently very little research on the nature of everyday social interaction and meaningful activity inside cars. This special issue addresses this situation by focusing on the car as a specific multi-semiotic site, as an environment for meaning-making and for situated and embodied social interaction. The issue offers systematic and detailed analyses of the practices and communicative actions in which people participate while on board a car. The papers here are concerned with both social interaction as the intertwining of multiple modalities of language, the body, and artefacts of the interior material world of the car, as well as with how the car’s movement in time and space through particular external physical surroundings contributes to, or is accomplished by, social interaction. Methodologically, the papers are primarily informed by principles and insights of conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and multimodal interaction analysis. In this special issue the car is considered as a ‘place’ or ‘space’ for meaningful and mediated activities. The papers examine how the physical and spatial configuration of the car, and its possibilities for mobility, can constrain or afford particular interactional practices, social activities and understandings, and impact upon language and processes of interaction. Compared to telephone conversations and most sites for ordinary interaction, interaction in cars creates particular demands, opportunities and orientations for its participants, as the car moves through the semiotically rich external environment. Generally, the papers in this special issue consider driving as not merely a requisite competence for accomplishing travel from point A to point B, but as occurring itself as a situated activity that is integrated with ordinary conversation.

On Driving a Car and Being a Family: A Reflexive Ethnography

Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life Ethnographic Approaches N Y Peter Lang Publishing, 2009

Driving a car and riding inside one strike most of us as utterly mundane activities, about which little can be said and from which even less can be studied. Except for a number of scholars who have-everyday life‖ as their primary site of investigation, most look oddly at investigations of such routine activity as car-driving. This is certainly the case where driving is pursued in everyday urban settings, or settings that do not include any outstanding routes, events, or destinations. These eventless events are perhaps the epitome of the banality of routine urban life. Such are the trips I wish to discuss in this chapter. Specifically, the trips I want to discuss took place during the spring of 2006, when I would take my then-first-grade daughter, Noa, to her school. Although only few years have passed since, if I had not taken notes at that time, none of those mundane occurrences would have been remembered, or survived for reflection. This is true simply because there was nothing in particular to remember or to report about. As Michel de Certeau (1984) famously argued, this quality of mundaneness, which is a consequence of the structure he called the-Ordinary,‖ is nothing less than an ideological structure located at the political, moral, and ideological base of late modern life. In this structure, ordinary activity is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized (xvii). If no one attends to it, it dissolves unattended, and we are gradually less and less informed about the practices and the environments that shape our lives, about the meanings they embody, and about the historical struggles in which we engage through them. Autoethnography, I argue, is a critical component of this endeavor. Addressing motion itself as it is embodied in modern transportation systems is done in this chapter by examining the social practices and material settings of everyday car travel. In what follows, I argue that different social systems are embodied by and performed in the same place and in the course of the same interaction while driving. My aim, which is to show autoethnographically how multiple and situated social roles and meanings emerge in and through car-driving, will be accomplished by looking inside the car and by addressing how people inside it make use of the social possibilities and material affordances that are available by the car. This I accomplish through the sensitivities that reflexive and autoethnographic methods make available. Hopefully, with the help of reflexive methods I will be able to draw a sensitive portrayal of the inside of the car, that is, a portrayal that addresses the

On Driving a Car and Being a Family: An Autoethnography

2009

Based on observations of drivers and passengers who engage in everyday car-ride routines, this presentation conceptualizes urban transportation as a highly complex social system, constitutive of everyday life. In this system, the common practice of car-driving is achieved via a set of ongoing cursive and non-cursive interactions. These interactions are materialized in and through the car, where unique material and technological features offer and shape a rich platform of interactional functions and affordances (Featherstone et al., 2005). These analytically include interactions inside the car, interactions with other vehicles, and interactions with the transportation infrastructure. Through situated, co-occurring and multimodal interactions various social roles are performatively sustained while driving. In this article, the examination of two pairs of roles will serve as case study: the interrelated performances of driver-passenger/father-daughter. While these roles are accomplished performatively in and through routine conversational exchanges, they are embodiments of different social systems: transportation (automobility) and family. While these roles sometimes contradict, at other times they interestingly reinforce each other; in both cases, these occurrences shape and are shaped by the activities of car-driving. The work is informed by ethnomethodological sensitivities and sensibilities, and uses ethnographic methods for researching language and communication within the context of automobility.

Inside cars changing automobilities and backseat passengering in experimental film and 360 video

Mobilities, 2023

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in passengering, there are no accounts on how backseat passengering links to experimental film and 360 video or how it responds to the broader relationship between automobilities, the organization of car travel and on-screen storytelling. To fill this gap, I follow up on the profiling of the passenger as a distinctive subject and object of infrastructures of mobility to discuss the backseat passenger’s experience, seen as both a socially engaged and embodied practice, in four stylistically distinct works, Larry Gottheim’s Harmonica, Lluis Escartín’s Mohave Cruising, Ken Jacobs’ Berkeley to San Francisco, and ASMR Driving at night: Back seat view. While Harmonica, Mohave Cruising and Berkeley to San Francisco are selective, self-aware experiments, which play out in various forms, ASMR is an authorless 360 drive video that lacks much aesthetic value and continues the long-established culture of scenic road and auto-tourism, turning on-site visitors into virtual tourists. Although each work approaches passengering visualities differently through exhibiting forward, side, parallax and 3 D views, they all articulate a multi-sensorial experience of driving and offer a relatively novel take on the practices of automobility through shifting the perspective of the driver and frontseat passenger to the backseat view.

Driving at Speed: Urban Experience and the Automobile

The role of the car in society has been the subject of considerable enquiry, both academic and non-academic. However, despite the highly prevalent nature of driving, very few studies have focused on the actual act of automobile driving, still less on the cultural and political characteristics of this globally-dispersed, everyday activity. This article, the first stage of a larger research project, seeks to provide an overall schema for the experience of driving. It does so both by drawing together new insights alongside other observations of automobile driving made by earlier commentators, and by proposing a general structure for understanding how different kinds of driving, at different speeds and on different kinds of road, produce distinct encounters with cities and architecture and, hence, also produce similarly distinct political and cultural experiences.

Defining Ritualistic Driver and Passenger Behaviour to Inform In-Vehicle Experiences

AutomotiveUI '18, 2018

By discovering unconscious ritualistic actions in everyday driving such as preparing for the morning commute, we seek design opportunities to help people achieve critical emotional transitions such as moving from an anxious state to relief. We have gathered and analysed data from workshops and phone interviews from a variety of vehicle and public transport users to capture these key ritualistic scenarios and map their emotional transitions. Design ideation is used to generate concepts for improving the in-vehicle user experience through redesign of vehicle layout, environment and analogue and digital interfaces. We report a set of human-centred design approaches that allow us to study the details of action, objects, people, emotions and meaning for typical car users which are indispensable for designing driving experiences and are often overlooked by the car design process.