How Cars Produce Streamlining Imagination for Modernisation

People are singing and dancing to celebrate the birthday for a car

On a screen, a bunch of people hand in hand are singing and dancing to celebrate the birthday for a car. You may feel ridiculous that how come people can perform an act to a car which tends to happened on a person in the flesh. However, such confusion can be resolved after visiting the exhibition at the V&A museum, called “Cars: Accelerating the Modern World”.

The birth of the car was along with the imagination of a future world, where liberated movement can be easily achieved. Streamlining cars then emerged, turning the hope into reality, and even extensive reality. This extension can be captured in aesthetic expressions of the products. The proliferation of streamlining design in daily life, including, clothes, staplers, radios, are signified the human’s fantasy for speed and progress.

Streamlining Objects in Daily life

In this sense, cars cannot be merely unpacked as objects by analysing their purely technological functioning, but the things they operate and the system between them and the things (Larkin, 2013). Such system and relationship are largely embedded in the human’s imagination for future, as an incomplete task, which becomes a force to accelerate people and the world in turn. One example is Henry Ford’s revolution in the way we make things. The first-ever moving assembly line in his car factories maximized production efficiency, which also changes people’s habits and sense of time. Simplifying the work by cutting time spending as much as possible becomes the instruction for people to interact with objects.

The way to do domestic work is also changed

If I use an adjective to conclude this exhibition, it should be “restless”. The things exhibited are all telling an information: we need to be streamlining, we need to speed up, and we need to arrive the paradise of modernisation. Under this temporality, the shape of the future seems to be fantastic. However, just as Benjamin’s grip of what he calls the moment of ’emergency’ as it runs by and away, I still sense a paradoxical thing “as it boils underneath what appears to be a quiet sea” (Navaro-Yashin, 2003: 15). That is, for example, people working in Ford’s factory should follow stern rules, which make their time, emotions, desires were controlled to move in a constructed rhythm.

“Fordladia”

So are cars making the fantasy of our future or it is just a fallacy? While institutional technological knowledge may provide a rational explanation for this question, figuring out the affection inscribed in the relationship between cars and the world can be much more essential. In other words, following the moments of emotions, such as surprise, love, desire and hate may be the key to understand how the perception for such fantasy is formed and the distance to the fantasy.

References:

Larkin, B. (2013). ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42(1), pp.327–343.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2003). ‘Life is dead here’: Sensing the political in ‘no man’s land’. Anthropological Theory, 3(1), pp.107-125.

Seigworth, G & Melissa, G. (2010). ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’. Introduction to the Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Linked Resources:

V&A. (2019) About the ‘Cars: Accelerating the Modern World’ exhibition, Retrieved from: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/about-the-cars-accelerating-the-modern-world-exhibition

Fiber Optics: Infrastructures of Light

Cellular Tower. Photo Credit: Alan Levine Licensed under CC-0

At first glance, it would seem that society is dominated by wireless systems that transmit data in a manner invisible to the human eye. What is even less visible is the hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optics that carry information at the speed of light, and the data centers that store and near instantaneously dole out this information at a user’s behest. The speed at which this information transfers has become almost second nature, and when a connection is slow to respond it can create less than optimal experiences, what NYU Media, Culture, and Communication professor Nicole Starosielski refers to as the ‘aesthetics of lag’¹ a term that updates Lucas Hildebrand’s notion of the ‘aesthetics of access’ which refers to the degrading of videotapes over repeated viewing. While digital information does not degrade in the same way as videotapes, the medium is susceptible to simultaneous repeated viewing, through restrictions in bandwidth, and the limitations of the data centers that serve up the information.

Fiber optics connecting a network switch.

While fiber optics are far faster at carrying information that any wireless standard, the connections break far more often than we realize. According to a 2008 WIRED Magazine article, undersea fiber cables break every three days, and terrestrial cables break far more often than that.² Thanks to the mandated use of decentralized networking, no on break in a line causes a complete break in the connection of the internet. The use of distributed networking is a holdover from the internet’s days of infancy, where it started first as a project of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) and then later under DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) as the agency moved under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Defense during the Cold War. The thought being that distributed networking would make the United States national information network impervious to nuclear attack.^3,4

If you imagine every line in this photo a network connection, it might help to understand the power in structure a distributed network has. Break a few connections and it makes no difference to the overall structure. Photo credit Berkshire Community College, licensed under CC-0

Network distribution in an office.

It is not just breaks that must be dealt with on a regular basis. Switching equipment is necessary to keep the fiber links up and running, and along with these switches comes a need for electricity, cooling, and security to keep the connections safe at every connection point. One such point is a network hotel, which WIRED toured in a 2015 article. The ‘hotel’ in downtown Manhattan was merely an outward façade of the building’s previous use. Inside were thousands of miles of cable, where fiber long haul cables come in from around the country and interfaces with local internet service providers.⁵ It is important to note that no fiber optic cable is without these types of facilities on either side of a cable.

 It is easy to turn a blind eye to the infrastructures necessary to keep our wireless world functioning. However if we peel back the black boxing of ‘technology’ and look at the technical systems that allow our current forms of communication to exist, we find that there are material infrastructures behind every bit of invisible ‘magic’.  

Sources

¹ Starosielski, Nicole 2015. Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure. In Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana; Chicago; and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, p. 53.

² WIRED Staff (2008). Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web. [online] WIRED. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/who-cut-the-cab/ [Accessed 19 Nov. 2019].

³ Green, L., 2010. The internet : an introduction to new media., Oxford: Berg.

⁴ Galloway, A.R. & American Council of Learned Societies, 2004. Protocol : how control exists after decentralization., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

⁵ WIRED Staff (2015). The Internet Lives in a Huge Hotel in Manhattan. [online] WIRED. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2015/11/peter-garritano-where-the-internet-lives/ [Accessed 19 Nov. 2019].