Conclusion: Mobility and Media

Summary

In March 2020, two weeks before the UK entered a period of national lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I visited a special exhibition at the V&A museum in London called ‘Cars: Accelerating the Modern World’. Travelling by taxi, train and underground from my home in Nottingham, two hours away, it was the last significant journey I would take for many months. The pandemic caused a deceleration in mobility across the modern world, an acute example of the ‘global humbling’ that Zadie Smith described (2020). Humbling is not a word generally associated with the impact of the car in modern culture. Acknowledging the role of the automobile in shaping global society, the V&A exhibit considered how ‘over its short 130-year history, the car has become one of the most loved, contested and influential innovations in the world’ (V&A 2020). As part of its ‘rear-view mirror’ on automotive history, the exhibition explored the centrality of automobiles in revolutionising manufacturing, transforming how we move, and in changing our cities, environment and economies. The curators were also alert to the function of popular media as part of the story, however. Throughout the twentieth century, and continuing today, the history of the automobile has been inseparable from the ads, films, print media and TV that have imagined cars and their place in modern life.

As mass phenomena of the modern world, the history of television and cars run adjacent; in each case early developments in production, technology and consumer use in the first half of the twentieth century laid the foundation for mainstream take‑up mid-century onwards, leading to global ubiquity by the century's end. Critics such as Margaret Morse have explicitly theorised the socio-historical connection between television and car-based realms of experience such as the freeway and the shopping mall. Exploring sites and principles of ‘privatized mobility’ developing after World War Two, Morse offers a critique of mass culture that relates transportation, broadcasting and retailing to what she calls, pessimistically, an ‘ontology of everyday distraction’ (1990). Exploring the entwined history of television and cars would require a different, and much longer, book. TV and Cars is deliberately modest in scope but hopefully productive in bringing two fields of enquiry together that have sometimes passed each other by: the respective study of mobility and media.