Automobility and the Power of Sound

This article analyses the connections between forms of solitary automobile habitation and the use of mobile sound technologies in automobiles: the radio, cassette, sound system and mobile phone. It does this through an empirically informed analysis of automobile use. In doing so it re-evaluates our understanding of the occupation of space and place, arguing that traditional concepts of urban space have underestimated the active role that the users of these communication technologies might have in transforming the meaning of these spaces as they pass through them. The article points to the powerful, and potentially problematic, role that sound technologies play in the daily experience of moving through the city.

[1]  Lambert Zuidervaart,et al.  Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. The Redemption of Illusion. , 1992 .

[2]  Fred Rush,et al.  The dialectic of enlightenment , 2004 .

[3]  R. Butsch.  The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television 1750-1990 , 2000 .

[4]  R. Silverstone.  Television And Everyday Life , 1994 .

[5]  D. Morley.  Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies , 1992 .

[6]  Mark Aakhus,et al.  Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance , 2002 .

[7]  Robert D. Putnam,et al.  Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community , 2000, CSCW '00.

[8]  Simon Frith,et al.  Music and everyday life , 2002 .

[9]  Martin Donougho.  Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion , 1993 .

[10]  J. Urry.  The ‘System’ of Automobility , 2004 .

[11]  M. Bull.  Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life , 2000 .

[12]  K. L. Ames.  Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter , 2000 .

[13]  Jo A. Tacchi,et al.  Radio texture: Between self and others , 2002 .

[14]  J. Sterne.  The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction , 2003 .

[15]  Shierry Weber Nicholsen,et al.  Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics , 1999 .

[16]  Charles Hirschkind.  Civic Virtue and Religious Reason: An Islamic Counterpublic , 2001 .

[17]  S. Douglas.  Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination , 1999 .

[18]  J. Urry.  Sociology beyond societies : mobilities for the twenty-first century , 2000 .

[19]  Wolfgang Sachs,et al.  For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires , 1992 .

[20]  E. Jephcott,et al.  Dialectic of Enlightenment , 2002 .

[21]  Raymond Williams,et al.  Resources of hope : culture, democracy, socialism , 1989 .

[22]  M. Augé.  Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity , 1995 .

[23]  D. Harvie.  Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity , 1996 .

[24]  Warren Brodsky,et al.  The effects of music tempo on simulated driving performance and vehicular control , 2001 .

[25]  R. Butsch,et al.  The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television 1750-1990 , 2000 .

[26]  J. Lull.  Inside Family Viewing , 1990 .

[27]  W. Schivelbusch,et al.  The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the 19th century , 1986 .

[28]  P. Efford.  Liquid of Love , 1985 .

[29]  J. Meyrowitz,et al.  No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. , 1987 .

[30]  Paul Heyer.  The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990 , 2000 .

[31]  J. M. Bernstein,et al.  The culture industry : selected essays on mass culture , 1991 .

[32]  J. Meyrowitz,et al.  No sense of place : the impact of electronic media on social behavior , 1988 .

[33]  R. Sennett.  Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization , 1994 .

[34]  Siegfried Kracauer,et al.  The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , 2005 .