What Is Smart Transportation Infrastructure? While smart technologies generally align with twenty-first-century sensibilities concerning technology, convenience, safety, and security, no consistent definition for smart exists. 2 In most uses, the
Search Results
Blue Sky Matter
Toward an (In-flight) Understanding of the Sensuousness of Mobilities Design
Ole B. Jensen and Phillip Vannini
it possible. Simply put, in what follows we ask how material design and sensations of airplane flight are entangled. Like other mundane technologies, such as boots, 3 airplanes play a crucial role in shaping space through the heterogeneous relations
Autonomous Vehicles and Gender
A Commentary
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder
working and reworking its Autopilot system, Google is actively testing autonomous technology through Waymo, and Uber’s autonomous rideshare program, Otto, is collecting lawsuits (including a suit from Google’s parent company for $700 million). 1 That said
Introduction
Autonomous Driving and the Transformation of Car Cultures
Jutta Weber and Fabian Kröger
self-driving cars—a promise made by the manufacturers and echoed in journalistic and popular culture discourse—rekindles the old familiar logic of a “technological fix”: technology is understood mainly as a tool to shape the social in a one
Nighttime Navigating
Moving a Container Ship through Darkness
Maria Borovnik
, seafarers use the technology that contemporary international transport requires. 2 Ship officers and crew, nevertheless, also depend on their experience and understanding of the geography of the seascape and any possible external forces impinging on their
Organic Vehicles and Passengers
The Tsetse Fly as Transient Analytical Workspace
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
that goes well beyond microbial, tsetse, big forest animals, and livestock to technologies that people devise to enable themselves to do certain work while on the move (in flight, on the bus, on the train, on foot, on treadmills, etc.). From charging
Moralizing Mobility?
Persuasive Technologies and the Ethics of Mobility
Andreas Spahn
There is a tension in any ethical evaluation of mobility. On the one side mobility is linked to elements of progress, cosmopolitism, autonomy, and freedom. On the other side increasing mobility causes worries with regard to safety and sustainability. This essay analyzes a suggested technical solution to the worries about safety and sustainability: the increasing usage of persuasive technologies to change individual behavior. Can and should we moralize mobility technologies by way of persuasion?
The French Quest for the Silent Car Body
Technology, Comfort, and Distinction in the Interwar Period
Stefan Krebs
Following Germany's resounding defeat in the First World War, the loss of its status as a colonial power, and the series of severe political and economic upheavals during the interwar years, travel abroad by motor vehicle was one way that Germans sought to renegotiate their place in the world. One important question critical studies of mobility should ask is if technologies of mobility contributed to the construction of cultural inequality, and if so in which ways? Although Germans were not alone in using technology to shore up notions of cultural superiority, the adventure narratives of interwar German motorists, both male and female, expressed aspirations for renewed German power on the global stage, based, in part, on the claimed superiority of German motor vehicle technology.
“The World Is My Domain”
Technology, Gender, and Orientalism in German Interwar Motorized Adventure Literature
Sasha Disko
Following Germany's resounding defeat in the First World War, the loss of its status as a colonial power, and the series of severe political and economic upheavals during the interwar years, travel abroad by motor vehicle was one way that Germans sought to renegotiate their place in the world. One important question critical studies of mobility should ask is if technologies of mobility contributed to the construction of cultural inequality, and if so in which ways? Although Germans were not alone in using technology to shore up notions of cultural superiority, the adventure narratives of interwar German motorists, both male and female, expressed aspirations for renewed German power on the global stage, based, in part, on the claimed superiority of German motor vehicle technology.
The Tyranny of Time and Space—Weakened but Not Vanquished
Comment on Special Section on Media and Mobility
Patricia L. Mokhtarian
People have exchanged messages across distances of space or time since the dawn of human history. Modern technologies, for both travel and telecommunication, have vastly increased the speed and reach of our communication potential, but the difference from the past is not just one of degree: at least one difference in kind is the convergence of information/computing technology with communication technology (ICT), and specifically the emergence of the (now-mobile) internet. Relationships between ICT and travel are numerous, complex, and paradoxical. Speculation that “modern“ ICT could substitute for travel virtually coincided with the invention of the telephone, but scholars as early as the 1970s also realized the potential for mutual synergy and generation. Although ICT and travel have diminished the tyranny of space, they cannot be said to have conquered it.