Our Community

On October 23, I got to listen to a worker from the Georgia Conservancy talk about the projects that she had played a part in, and the efforts that were made by the Georgia Conservancy, an organization that I had not even known to have existed before the presentation, were surprisingly large scale and very public. They worked all around the state in order to improve the living quality of the people through the use of proper planning of transportation, conservation of ecology, and moderation of the consumption of certain finite resources. To say the least, I was impressed to see a powerful group of people that worked actively with the government and for the greater good of their states-people.

One of the most interesting facts to me was that this strong organization, which has a formidable amount of workers and researchers in this present day, had started with a single man: US Congressman James Mackay. Of course, he did not work on a whole issue of environmental stability by himself; but the people that he worked with were not researchers with Ph. D’s and esteemed politicians. They were a “group of concerned citizens” according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Normal people who had happened to stumble upon and feel anxiety about an arising issue; people that fell in the same category of human being as me.

This made me wonder about what I had done for the betterment of the general welfare of the public. If a person like me, an average person, but a person with a voice, hands, and feet, had put my efforts into bettering my community, I could have accomplished something, even if that something was not majorly significant. However, in light of the fact that there are millions of people who have the potential to act just as I do, I suddenly felt that there was a sleeping force that lay stagnant within the people of my community, including myself. There was the opening of being able to actively serve the community with various activities, whether they are individual efforts to send emails to important figures about the problems in the community or massive, unified events where people can create a large body to influence the planning and creating of their communities. Otherwise, there is no way that the government, which often seems like a distant power with no empathy for certain people, to know who to account for in their actions. Our voices in the political stage could provide energy for the government to act more precisely and effectively, minimizing the dissent of people who may have stayed silent and been overlooked.

The important factor for being active about the community is keeping on the lookout for the potential problems, or problems that have been ignored for a time. It is in all of our powers to be active, just as the Georgia Conservancy is today. As a young college student, I feel as though there is potential for change in my new home, Georgia Tech, and I hope that I can be a participant in that change when the chance arrives.

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1010

http://www.georgiaconservancy.org/

American Car Culture

America is a car culture. In my previous blog posts, I wrote about how America was a car dependent culture because many Americans depend on their personal automobiles to go to work so they can get paid and drive to places to spend that money on food and goods. On an even larger scale, most goods require automobile transportation to be moved across the country. Automobiles help us live our lives easily, but that’s not all there is to it. There’s a more historic reason Americans love using cars. Cars are part of the American culture because of the feeling of individualism they inspire and their prevalence in American life and media.

Cars give drivers the individualism to pursue the American dream because of their freedom of mobility. According to Michael Ferro, the American car represents individualism and other characteristics of the dream.

“In the US, the car has come to embody a conception of individualism whose roots might be traced to the talks and writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, in which he focused on the virtue of following one’s own thoughts and intuitions and the avoidance of a superficial conformity.” (Scheller 34)

Emerson was a legendary American writer known for his writing on the subject of American individualism. He played a great role in making individualism become one of the core American values and part of the American dream. (Churchyard) Ferro claims that the car embodies individualism. This is true because the car is what gives most Americans their physical mobility. The idea that a person can go anywhere on their own with their car is a great example of the reason that cars embody individualism. The very idea of an impromptu road trip wouldn’t exist without cars. This has been the case since the invention of the car in the 1920s, so most people alive today weren’t around when cars weren’t. The physical mobility that we can afford through cars gives us the power and the independence that are characteristic of the American dream.

Aside from the historical connection between cars, individualism, and the American dream, there’s also a much simpler reason that cars are so important to us: we see them everywhere. Ferro says that “cars are fundamental units of the lives of Americans because of the way we drive them, ride in them, and cannot avoid seeing or hearing them every day.” (Scheller 34) Most people ride in a car every day, and even more people see cars every day. Cars are everywhere, including in American movies, television, and books. In class, we discussed how television advertisements often include cars even when advertising something completely unrelated to cars. Personally, I can’t remember a single day going by without interacting with a car in some fashion. Avoiding the influence that car culture has had on all aspects of American culture is virtually impossible, even for those who don’t own or use a car.

American culture promotes cars through the ideal of individualism. The American dream promotes individualism, and American entertainment and media publish the images of cars and their relationship to individualism and personal success. It’s nearly impossible to be an American and not be heavily influenced by car culture.

Works Cited

Scheller, Preston, Eric C. Bruun, and Jeffrey R. Kenworthy. Introduction to Sustainable Transportation: Policy, Planning and Implementation. London: Earthscan, 2010.

Churchyard, Charles. “American Individualism and Emerson, Its Champion” CharlesChurchyard.com. Web. 5 Oct 2011.

The impact of mass media on car culture

By Yihang Yan

There are many resources in the world of automobile to stimulate interest in both fellow enthusiasts and newcomers. Without exaggeration, automobile becomes an inseparable part in our life and a certain kind of car culture and lifestyle has been built. But culture is shifting. Media which is given huge power plays an important role in the future development of car culture. Does mass media perpetuate or discourage car culture?

Auto dealerships hosted the events, built the showrooms, created the images and provided the variety of setting that disseminated car culture to the different places of country. With the improvement of mass media, advertising executives of automobile companies tried their best to promote automobile as sexy and desirable commodities via TV, the Internet, fashion magazine and other mainstream press. In the Chapter 2 of Intro to Sustainable Trans, the author Preston L. Schiller also mentioned that most advertising aims at the creation or exploitation of a relationship: an identification and association between product and consumer…… even after learning that they have purchased a product that is defective, dangerous or environmentally harmful^<1>. It is a central strategy of automobile advertising to invite viewers or consumers to imagine themselves within the world of advertisements. This is a world that works by presenting audiences with an imagined future, the promise to consumers of things they will have and a lifestyle they can take part in. we can use commodities to construct our identities or convey our personality. For example, owners of luxurious cars are perceived to be trendy and savvy. Images from SUV ads often connote strength, power and individuality. From this perspective, media allures people to the automotive community and construct the culture ideas of lifestyle and self-image.

Moreover, with the help of the internet, anyone can involve themselves with the car culture. We can open the browsers and see the community alive and real. Before the online presence, people must make times more effort to become a part of the car world. Now we not only can easily obtain the variety of information about automobile but also actively participate online activities and find people who share the same interests. There is also media to enhance this growth.

However, the number of Americans saying they saw their cars as “something special”, more than just a means of transportation, had dropped from 43 to 23 percent^<2>. In 1978, nearly half of 16-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds in the U.S. had their driver's licenses, according to Department of Transportation data. By 2008, the most recent year data was available, only 31% of 16-year-olds and 49% of 17-year-olds had licenses, with the decline accelerating rapidly since 1998. It's not just new drivers driving less. The share of automobile miles driven by people aged 21 to 30 in the U.S. fell to 13.7% in 2009 from 18.3% in 2001 and 20.8% in 1995, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration's National Household Travel Survey released earlier this year^<3>. The allure of the automobile is diminishing. Although mass media makes us more accessible to the automotive world, environmentalists also can make good use of it to promote their belief. The need to alleviate congestion and air pollution attracts more attention which has inspired more people to conceive creative and visionary strategies for pedestrian-friendly cities and discouraged the car-dependent culture. In south Florida, there are lots of advertisements on the side of transit buses. Other than this reason, people are more into electronic and multimedia gadgets like iPODS, Blackberries and Droids, etc. For the younger generations, digital media are gradually replacing the status, freedom and belonging that automobiles used to best represent.

Figures: http://adage.com/article/digital/digital-revolution-driving-decline-u-s-car-culture/144155/

Through the analysis above, it is not easy to identify mass media as either booster or dissenter of the car culture. Car-dependent culture has been established for a long time which cannot be changed overly due to any external factor in the short period of time. What matter is how we can utilize mass media to obtain the balanced relation between the daily life and our cars.

Word Cited:

<1> Intro to Sustainable Trans (Preston L. Schiller)

<2>Five Media Myths That perpetuate Car culture

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2011/05/23/five-media-myths-that-perpetuate-car-culture/

<3> Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture?

http://adage.com/article/digital/digital-revolution-driving-decline-u-s-car-culture/144155/show more show less