Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States

摘要

Historians and social commentators generally assume that the automobile has transformed American society. There can be little doubt that America has become a "car culture." But rather less attention has been given to how American society shaped the car— particularly rural society. Although historians usually mention the farm background of Henry Ford and describe the importance of the rural market in the diffusion of the automobile in North America, they have, by far, concentrated on the history of the car in urban settings. Most authors relate the technical, business, and social history of the automobile in terms of urban inventors, urban manufacturers, city pleasures, city traffic jams, and suburban sprawl. Those who have studied the automobile in the American countryside have concentrated on the social "impact" of the car and the fascination of rural people with Henry Ford and his Model T. Most have seen the car as an "external" force that transformed rural society, usually by urbanizing it. They have described in passing how farm people used the car or modified it for purposes not intended by manufacturers. But these actions have taken a backseat to a form of technological determinism evident in most rural as well as urban automotive histories, in which autonomous technological forces drive social change. In this essay, we turn these assumptions around and argue that users of technology acted as agents of technological change. By treating farm people as active participants in the social construction of the automobile, we seek to extend recent work in the history of technology that shifts the field's traditional focus from the "producers" of technology (e.g., inventors, engineers, and manufacturers) to the "users" of technology (e.g., laborers, factory owners, home-workers, and consumers) . Within this growing body of scholarship, we support a more specific claim that the use of an artifact or system has not only resulted in unforeseen consequences, but that users have helped to shape the artifact or system itself. Susan Douglas, for example, has demonstrated that radio amateurs helped change the dominant interpretation of radio from point-to-point communication to broadcasting. Claude Fischer and Michele Martin have argued that the actions of telephone callers eventually convinced the industry to regard the telephone as a social, as well as a business, instrument. And David Nye has described the manifold social meanings given to electric streetlights, trolleys, factories, appliances, and electricity itself by a wide variety of users. Our case study on the automobile goes beyond this work to consider how actions taken by users resulted in changes to both the interpretation and design of an artifact considered to be relatively stable.