Packer & Oswald

The Communication Review, 13:309–339, 2010 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4421 print/1547-7487 online DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2010.525478 From Windscreen to Widescreen: Screening Technologies and Mobile Communication JEREMY PACKER Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA KATHLEEN F. OSWALD Doctoral Candidate, Communication, Rhetoric & Digital Media Program, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA This article suggests that studies of mobile media need to be more attentive to the history of screening technologies. The development of screening technologies is examined by identifying six characteristics—storage and access, interactivity, mobility, control, informationalization, and convergence/translation—through the context of automobility. A brief history of the informationalization of driving, mobile entertainment in the car, and networked auto- mobiles is used to exemplify how screening technologies work. The article concludes by arguing that the development of screening technologies is central to understanding the processes through which conduct is increasingly organized, monitored, and governed. Supplementary materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher’s online edition of The Communication Review for the following free supplemental resources: Historic illustrations of how media were made mobile. The study of mobile communication has been overwhelmingly beholden to the cellular telephone and has too often ignored the long history of technologies that bring together means of communication with those of mobility. One exemplary case of the technological translation of these two arenas is the automobile (J. Hay & J. Packer, 2004). As Mike Featherstone (2004) suggested, the “automobile is one everyday object where human beings Address correspondence to Jeremy Packer, Department of Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, North Carolina State University, 106 Winston Hall, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA. E-mail: [email protected] 309 310 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald regularly encounter new technologies in their everyday lives and learn to ‘inhabit technology”’ (p. 10, as cited in Sheller 2007). We will show how such encounters are intensifying through screening technologies, a concept we develop as a means for explaining the logics that currently govern mobile communication. By governing logics, we mean the technological, cultural, economic, and governmental trends, rules, and capacities that make certain forms of conduct acceptable, necessary, or desirable. There are at least three compelling reasons to place the automobile at the center of any history of mobile communication. First, the historical processes through which communication has been made mobile must be understood within the trend toward autonomous and individuated mobility. As Raymond Williams (2003, first published in 1974) explained, this mobile privatization depended on automotive and communication systems that first began to appear shortly after the turn of the 20th century. James Hay (2003) extended Williams’ analysis to account for the rise of neoliberal modes of governmentality that intensified during the 1980s and 1990s. Like Hay, we would like to extend Williams’ work to account for continued economic, political, and cultural changes that correspond with developments in new communication technologies. Second, rumination upon the technological history of the automobile allows us to understand the process by which communication technologies increasingly mediate our experience of the world. It is not only that we become disengaged from the real world and more caught up with media. Rather, our sensations, how we experience the world, get quantified and organized into specific information processing systems. This informationalization objectifies and limits sensate experience by focusing attention on specific phenomena as opposed to others and situ- ates them as measurable qualities within a spectrum of relative acceptability. Third, forms of mobile communication are very often first introduced in the automobile because of the ubiquity of their use and their capacity to incor- porate miniaturization and to provide sufficient electricity. Three specific historical trajectories capture these processes: screens within the automobile; highway hi-fi, or the car as locus of entertainment; and the car as conduit for communication. We suggest that a history of auto-mobile communication functions as an ongoing prehistory of what currently is conceived of as mobile communication. As suggested, scholarship on mobile communication is dominated by discussion of the cellular telephone (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu, & Sey, 2009; Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Katz & Castells, 2008). Although researchers have increasingly looked beyond mere telephony to include mobile or pervasive gaming (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2009), locative technologies (Goggin & Hjorth, 2009), and other applications, such analyses are primarily device driven. Such an approach to technology has been criticized for its basis upon a stagnant understanding of technology and society in which a specific technology changes an already existent and stable society (Slack & Screening Technologies 311 Wise, 2007; Williams, 1974). For instance, how does the cellular telephone alter familial relationships, leisure activities, or the productivity of workers? Although public discussion of cellular telephone use has been organized by concerns over the safety of talking, or most recently texting, on a phone while driving, this trend over the relative safety of communication in the car is merely the most recent scare to follow along the logic of commu- nicative “lack or excess” that began as early as the 1910s (Packer, 2006, p. 83). We prefer to start not with communication technologies per se, but rather within the broader logic of communication in its older, pretelegraph, definition; the overcoming of natural barriers to facilitate the movement of people, goods, and culture (Carey, 1989; Mattelart, 1996). From this vantage, mobility is always already implicit in communication. The most dominant such facilitative formation of mobility in the United States is the automobility system, which accounts for nearly 90% of all people miles traveled (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2010), nearly 70% of the total tonnage of all goods transported (American Trucking Associations, 2010) and an unquantifiable segment of American culture. However, the fact that the United States is a “car culture” is well documented (Miller, 2001; Packer, 2008; Patton, 1986; Seiler, 2008). Mobility scholar John Urry (2007) argued that the car is “not just a transport system for getting to one place from another,” but rather “the quintessential manufactured object produced by the leading industrial sec- tors and the iconic firms within twentieth-century capitalism” (p. 115). Urry noted that spending on cars relative to other expenses remains substantial, as does the connection of the automobile to other systems and the overall perception of flexible movement and time. The past few years have been fruitful for scholarship that explicitly struggles with the relationship between history and communication— specifically communication technologies (Acland, 2007; Gitelman, 2008; Gitelman & Pingree, 2004; Zelizer, 2008). Williams’ book, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, is often noted as an exemplary account of communication history either as a model of good work (Slack & Wise, 2005) or an example of a cultural strand of historical scholarship (Nerone, 2005). Williams warned against numerous pitfalls of common approaches to historicizing the relation between technology and society, in particular communication technologies. The most obvious and dominant strands of such historicizing is routinely rounded-up by wielding the term technological determinism. Marshall McLuhan has often been the prized sport of such criticisms, and in fact it is his work that Williams is rather explicitly cri- tiquing in Television. In fact, McLuhan, and to a lesser extent Harold Innis, are still used as exemplary figures of a related tradition of historiograph- ical approach. John Nerone situated this approach within a trend toward natural histories or grand narratives in which technology is seen to deter- mine outcomes of social and political change over time. Technology becomes a vessel of determinant forces in the social constructionist vein 312 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald of communication scholarship in which Nerone situated Raymond Williams as an exemplar, but with a grand theoretical yearning masked by the term cultural form or by what Williams (1961) called elsewhere structure of feel- ing. Williams’ mobile privatization sits uneasily between the naturalizing tendency of grand theory and the social constructivism found most notably in the social historians of technology. For Williams (2003), the technological changes that took place in the mid-20th century are best described by the forms of mobile privatization,“an operative relationship between a new kind of expanded, mobile and com- plex society and the development of a modern communications technology” (p. 13). Yet, according to Williams, communications technologies are first and foremost developed to solve “problems of communication and control in expanded military and commercial operations” (p. 13). The history we tell works to update mobile privatization, but with an eye toward communication technologies as control

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