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 develop- ment 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 tech- nologies 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 tech- nologies 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 mobil- ity. 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 eco- nomic, political, and cultural changes that correspond with developments in new communication technologies. Second, rumination upon the techno- logical 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 communica- tion 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 technologi- cal 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 communica- tion technologies as control mechanisms. Whether it is the control of flows of commerce and capital as in James Carey’s (1989) story of the telegraph or troop movements and guided missiles (Kittler, 1999), commercial and mil- itary dominance are as much about superior communication technologies (transport and transmission) as any other advantage. Further, these tech- nologies in their capacity to both enhance user control over environments as well as the capacity to manage users in environments gestures to the poten- tials of what Deleuze (1995) described in “Postscript on Control Societies.” Opposed to disciplinary societies with more defined roles and boundaries in time and space, in control societies the ways that one relates becomes increasingly complex: “control man undulates, moving among a continuous range of different orbits” (Deleuze, p. 180). We identify screens as a mech- anism by which the mobile subject manages relations—with the road, the vehicle, consumption, and others inside and outside of the vehicle—while moving through these orbits. We are not alone in working through this line of reasoning as it relates to the automobile. Scholarship has begun to acknowledge the increasingly interconnected and automated nature of automobility (Sheller, 2007). In their discussion of automated management in automobility, Dodge and Kitchin (2006) argued that new automated systems operating at three levels—infrastructure, vehicle, and driver—are displacing older forms of discipline and reshaping driver behavior in ways that make information easier to capture. Citing a distinction between data (from the Latin “to give”) and capta (“to take”), Dodge and Kitchin explained that in systems of capture, (a) monitoring is inherent to the system; (b) they seek to be exhaustive; (c) they are fully automated; (d) they are distributed, mobile, and real time; and (e) they are used by a diverse set of interests, both public and private (p. 14). In addi- tion, Dodge and Kitchin urged exploration of these systems in which “more important grammars of action are internalized and invisible to observation and inaccessible to critical analysis” (p. 21). Screening Technologies 313

Our focus in this article is less about the totality of systems designed to manage mobility from the vantage of surveillance, traffic engineering, or city planning, as it is in other researchers’ work (e.g., Monahan, 2007)—and more about the historical precursors that make such networked management possible. We suggest that individual drivers have for decades augmented and managed their mobility through an array of mechanical, electronic, and, eventually, digital technologies. We suggest that by combining various understandings of the term screen or screening, a broader theoretical under- standing emerges for critically examining the grammars that Dodge and Kitchin gestured toward. We do so by historicizing various forms of screens in the car: from the work done to insulate the driver from the road environ- ment to create a driving environment in the cabin to the ways in which sys- tems within the car (e.g., cruise control, lane assist) have enhanced the driv- ing environment, further screening the driver from not only the elements, but also elements of operating the vehicle. From a communications perspective, following from Friedrich Kittler (2010), who followed from Claude Shannon (1948), we investigate the ways that technologies of screening have inter- sected with the car in order to modify the driving space by reducing noise or adding information. As Shannon suggested, “The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages” (p. 379).

Screening Technologies Our conception of screening technologies is an attempt to provide a new framework for understanding the intertwined relationship between mobility and communication in the contemporary period. In part, we see screen- ing technologies as a way of building upon Williams’ (2003) notion of mobile privatization while acknowledging that the age of analog broadcast television has clearly passed. What we mean here by screening technolo- gies are the technologies and practices that act as both personal viewing technologies (e.g., cell phones, Global Positioning System (GPS), netbooks) with practices and technologies of socially screening persons (e.g., airport security, biometrics, profiling) to manage appropriate conduct. The personal technologies work then to collect and distribute data and redirect conduct. Williams was describing a period in which space, time, and capital came to be organized by suburbanization, commuting, broadcast, and bureaucratic corporate industrialization. The flexibility of labor and capital (Harvey, 1991), increased mobility (Urry, 2007), and the digitalization of media (Kittler, 1999) have radically altered the pace and scale at which social, economic, and political interaction are established and played out. Such change suggests mobile privatization must be reconsidered in this new context. The screen has come to be present in nearly all spaces (Couldry & McCarthy, 2004), especially spaces of movement (the body, car, bus, air- plane, urban street). Further, screens are not merely to be seen, but rather 314 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald they have become increasingly interactive and work to collect site and tra- jectory specific data from those using them or from attendant networked technologies (Andrejevic, 2002). It should come as no surprise that accord- ing to Lev Manovich (1995), the true precursor to our computer screens is not television, but rather military radar used to track enemy locations. Such new screens were further noteworthy because they imaged real-time changes of their referent. Such screens work as a practice of seeing and being seen, a reference tool and reference point. From the consumer side, expanding product lines for devices between phones and laptops—such as smart phones, tablets, and netbooks—attest to the successful production of desire for mobile network connection. From simple two-way communication to Web publishing, these devices are increasingly critical to the ways that some communicate, schedule, and manage their world: filtering search results, sorting through contacts, screening calls. Yet, more fundamen- tally, the amassing and sorting of data necessary to screen individuals for medical, procedural, economic, and social flaws or exceptional states is increasingly done through mobile communications. Hence, screening tech- nologies increasingly act as the fundamental points of intersection between individuals and the apparatuses that govern conduct. Analog screens, best exemplified by the colander or sieve, physically allow some substances (fresh air, boiling water) to pass while denying access to others (insects, pasta) through channels (holes) of fixed size and shape. They act as rigid systems of normalization and separation, as in disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977). Digital and biometric screens work in more flexible ways. Their sieves can be altered one individual at a time, acting differently in one place rather than another and according to differing schedules. Which information, through what channel, at what speed, and for how long can easily be regulated by simple and prevalent software. The analog screening technologies of broadcast that Williams (2003) described acted to normalize through few channels (three networks), according to fixed schedules (daytime, primetime, drive time), specified arenas of reception (living room, car), with programming aimed at capturing attention via the lowest common denomi- nator (LCD). Our new LCDs (liquid crystal displays) are interactive, flexible, and ubiquitous—liquid in many senses of the term. They are far more manip- ulable; they can change data flow’s shape, direction, speed, and place to suit the needs of different scenarios and ends. These screens capture and arrest not just attention, but nearly unquantifiable amounts of capital, information or algorithmic knowledge—tastes, patterns of use, placements, and movement. Further, they enable new capacities users to extend the reach of network power. Users are not just separated into categories, as with a traditional sieve, their activities instead become the data for generating real-time manipulations of the sieve. Further, they too manipulate and extend the power of the sieve, bringing it into new territories of use and connecting it with networks (social and technological) that it had not previously been an element. Screening Technologies 315

We identify six main characteristics necessary for screening technolo- gies to come to fruition: (a) storage and access, (b) interactivity, (c) mobility, (d) control, (e) informationalization, and (f) convergence/translation. First, screening technologies have developed on the basis of increases in informa- tion storage and access. Revolutions in data storage capacities, as physically movable units (e.g., vinyl records, cassette tapes) and remotely accessible content (e.g., on-demand cable or the Library of Congress Web site) have enabled greater control over the quantity, range, and speed with which data can be accessed, networked, and processed. The amount of data/content that can be “carried” has grown at exponential rate. Content users and data processors are increasingly trading the burden of storage for one of access, as more and more information comes to be stored elsewhere and accessed via the network (as can be seen in the move from terminals to access devices such as netbooks and tablets). Increased access not only enables more entrants and more data; it is also tied to interactivity, another key component of screening technologies. Present modes of interactivity blend point-to-point and broadcasting forms of communication as increased storage and transmission capacities enable more flexible modes of communication. Advances in storage and access to high-bandwidth interactive networks combined with mass production of the microchip means that these technologies of screening are far more widely dispersed through the physical environment due to drastically reduced cost and size and a coconstitutive increase in their usefulness. These changes are tied to the third characteristic of screening technologies—mobility—by which we mean to suggest not only mobile media and distributed access, but also increasingly extensive ways of viewing, listening, writing, creating, photographing, and recording. More significant is that technologies of com- municative interactivity are everywhere accessible and inescapable. They are not merely chosen, but forced into use across fields of conduct; creating a sort of force field that organizes who and what can move where, when, and how. This leads to our next three characteristics. The other three characteristics are in a somewhat different class. By this, we mean to focus on the potentials in the use of screening technologies: control, informationalization, and convergence. Control leverages storage and access, interactivity, and mobility (of both consumption and content), enabling the capacity for on-demand communication content. Individual users have control over media content in ways that vastly surpass what has previously been known, what has been called a control revolution (Shapiro, 1999). Content is available at user command at any time and every- where a connection is live. At the same time, users become a data point, part of an aggregate that informs other users, corporations, and govern- ments of positions, tastes, and behaviors. Where broadcasting addressed a broadly conceived “mass,” personal media enable the mediating of persons. As users activate networks such as the distributed ATM, air travel, and driving 316 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald network, they open themselves to the screening of credit scores, faces, passports, driver’s licenses and other algorithmic data used to construct algorithmic identities (Packer, 2007, p. 211). These data can be collected in person and remotely through use patterns. Screening technologies enable the filtering of the immediate environment; they also serve as mechanisms through which individuals can be filtered, sorted, and screened. Control is a two-way street. A fifth element of screening technologies is that of mediated infor- mationalization. What we mean by this is that more and more of the world is made known through directly and immediately accessible digital representations of the world. Nearly 50 years ago, Marshall McLuhan (2003) suggested such transformations in Understanding Media:

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous system, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls—all such extensions of our bodies including our cities—will be translated into information systems. (p. 86)

An obvious example of this would be GPS-enabled maps and direction- giving applications that guide pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit patrons, and automobile drivers. Specific yet multiple aspects of the world are chosen to be represented as information through a digital screen. Everything from the number of our friends (Facebook), how much we are worth (ATM), the cost of our caloric intake (checkout screens), our health (blood pressure gauges on treadmills), where we are (GPS), where we can go (passport- enabled airline kiosks), and how fast we can get there (speedometer) are constantly displayed to us by way of screens that do not merely represent the world, but rather filter the elements that are significant, by general type and specific instance. In communication terms, they screen out noise to heighten clarity, allowing specific forms of knowledge to form that dictate what matters for any given situation. Data are mined to separate data wheat from data trash, generating information. What complicates and intensifies the potentials of these devices for con- trol is what we identify as the last characteristic of screening technologies: convergence/translation brought on by a universal digital. As the default becomes the digital, we expect (and accept) that our mobile devices will either merge into a single, at the moment handheld, solution (iPhone, BlackBerry, netbook, tablet) or that numerous mobile devices will all be able to interconnect (Bluetooth, data cloud). As Kittler (1999) noted, this convergence depends on the reduction of everything to digital code. Once everything can become digitized (our thoughts and dreams through brain scans, our health via ultrasounds and CAT scans, our future desires through Amazon and Netflix), we end up with a set of screening technologies Screening Technologies 317 that digitize, measure, and aggregate us as individuals and collectivities for biopolitical action. Screening technologies are then not merely a “new technology,” but a networked mechanism of real-time control at a distance, simultaneously abstract and material. It is grounded in tunnels that carry broadband lines below our feet, through multiple data spectrums that swirl through the ether, and in the cars, buses, and trains of our daily commutes. To demonstrate the long history of such screening, we consider the ways that broadcasting and point-to-point communication, advances in automotive technology, and broader social practices intersected in the auto- mobile to produce and extend the screen and practices of screening. Logics of screening, although present in the automobile from the beginning, have evolved over the years from static screens to dynamic screens, or filters that embody logics of flexible control. These technologies screen “the elements” in and out of the mobile environment, enabling the individual to manage work, home, and personal time in the car. Although the driver seems to be “more free” through use of these technologies, they work to further enmesh the auto-mobile subject into a fully networked system. More to the point, such a communico-automobile assemblage is an always-experimental realm in which struggles over the enactment, control, and exploitation of mobility take place.

From Windscreen to Widescreen: From Sensation to Information Our historical investigation begins with the development of technologies that insulate the driver from the “elements,” understood as naturally occur- ring distractions and impediments to safe driving. We ask, “How have screens functioned in the automobile?”—first used in the act of driving, then for entertainment, and finally, to mixed-use screens that blend a number of driver information functions, communication services and features that operate both inside and outside the car. As the capable speed of vehicles increased, means of “screening” sensation and information became increas- ingly important. The windshield—perhaps better understood in terms of a “windscreen” as it is more commonly known in the United Kingdom—served as a vital means of “screening out” the elements, allowing visual informa- tion to pass through to the diver and passengers. Other early developments within the automobile were resonant with this logic, and focused on reduc- ing environmental factors such as road noise (insulation), cold weather (heater), and road feel (shocks, inflated tires). These and other develop- ments contributed to the development of a comfortable space in which the driver is able to process “relevant” information in order to safely operate the vehicle. In communication terms, we see a trend toward an increase in clarity or fidelity of messages and a decrease in “noise.” The windshield remains an important border zone of safety and it is maintained by reducing unwanted visual noise. Technologies have been 318 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald developed to keep it clear of rain drops and clean of bug splatter, road grime, and salt residue, making what was once the paid labor of gas station attendants automated and actuated with the pull of a lever or the push of a button. Although the sun provides the necessary light to navigate, too much sun creates visual noise. The glare of the sun is screened out with visors, sunglasses, and window tinting. The need to drive after the sun had set demanded that McLuhan’s first and purest form of electronic media be added to the car, the electric light. Even safety glass can be understood in these terms: Originally made from ordinary window glass, the windshield was eventually laminated, which reduced glass shards or wildlife from passing into the car. The screen is indeed a shield. While the windshield serves as a means for gathering immediate visual information, instrumentation keeps the driver in touch with the vehicle itself. Though the dashboard originally served the very basic purpose of reducing driver contact with the road (in a material sense), we commonly use the word today to refer to the housing of the instrument panel. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that a dashboard originally consisted of “a board or leathern apron in the front of a vehicle, to prevent mud from being splashed by the heels of the horses upon the interior of the vehicle.” This is a critical step in that as the boundary between the “inside” and “outside” of the car becomes more distinct—the outside referring to what is outside of the body of the vehicle and the inside coming to be defined by the passenger compartment—the internal workings of the car are increasingly “black boxed.” Today’s dashboards increasingly serve as sites of informa- tionalization, housing gauges indicating everything from the basic vehicle information (engine temperature, speed, and engine work) to advanced dig- ital displays. What happens under the hood comes to be understood as information rather than sensation. As insulation in the vehicle improves, drivers can no longer sense engine temperature, and need a temperature gauge. Drivers become less able and attuned to listening for engine speed, and so need a tachometer to quantify engine speed in terms of revolutions per minute. As the car becomes more enclosed and drivers are less able to sense speed (other than visually), the speedometer is increasingly important. However, what needs to be stressed here is that speed changes in form— from something to be sensed or experienced to something to be measured and ultimately governed through the speed limit. In other words, the pro- cess of informationalization is necessary for forms of control and discipline to work upon mobile conduct. Screening technologies make certain infor- mation relevant not only to drivers, but to specific forms of governance and control. Just as the driver must govern engine RPM to avoid mechanical malfunction, she must govern her speed to avoid social malfunction. With the emergence of electronic instrument clusters in the 1980s, these gauges gained new context. Although the new digital format meant that speed could only be displayed in whole numbers, new calculations could Screening Technologies 319 be performed, enabling new analytics for the driver. Digital clocks and out- side temperature are captured in the same cluster as traditional readouts, which are now also processed in terms of miles left to refueling and average speed. It is significant that something as simple as a miles-to-refueling calcu- lation is not possible until microelectronics enables the storage and access requirements to be met for real-time calculations. Rather than providing a summary of the current conditions of the car as machine that an analog instrument does, a miles-to-refueling calculation is dynamic, and takes into account fuel, speed, and distance. Within this larger shift to leverage storage and access, interactivity, and calculation of data by on-board computer, the driver is now presented with a new level of information related to driving rather than data about various mechanical components. Although the electronic speedometer did not endure (with most vehi- cles relying on traditional analog gauges for speed), many of the features made possible by the electronic dash are available as options in vehicles today. This demonstrates that although not all moves away from analog readouts are welcomed by drivers, what they make possible in terms of new information has become an important part of the operating the car. The car, as with other media, moved from analog measurement and display, to becoming a digital information producer, distributor, and processor. This shift corresponded with new technological capabilities and a further removal of the driver and mechanic from the material into the realm of the digital. As electronics and eventually computers come to be integrated by man- ufacturers, different information is collected (and stored) within the car. New features such as automatic breaking systems, traction control, and advances such as Volkswagen’s Electronic Stabilization Program begin to make the car smarter—from functions that are automatic to others that work to redis- tribute power and finally, toward a system that gestures toward knowing about problems even before the driver. The advent of these technologies is accompanied by the black box within the engine that has been black boxed as an area the passengers should not think about. This increased integra- tion of information technologies even black-boxes under the hood for the car hobbyist: The driver is screened out of this former space of play or necessity through a series of advances that devalues the place of the repair manual and years of experience. Repairs are screened through a process that requires specially trained individuals schooled in the latest techniques and carrying the latest tools. They are no longer mechanics, but rather tech- nicians, and the car has become a new instrument—no longer a machine, but rather a device. Although the driver is increasingly boxed out of the hands-on of auto- mobile maintenance and repair, he or she is at the same time the target of a variety of new-and-improved ways of navigating the driving experi- ence. Along with previous instrumentation and gauge technology such as the tachometer and speedometer and new information such as average speed, 320 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald fuel efficiency, and tire pressure warning lights, the driver of the new mil- lennium owned a Global Positioning System (GPS). Developed by the U.S. military and later extended to civilian use, GPS technology enabled a new way of understanding the place of the driver and the road. GPS works to replace three analog communication technologies at once: mileage markers, road signage, and maps. This screen constitutes a new personalized point of view—the world from where you are, everything in your reach, locations rushing around you. On the display, it is not you but the environment that moves; you are in the car, precisely where you intend to be. This move to informationalize the car wasn’t only happening under the hood and on the dash, however. At the same time that the driver is abstracted from driving (and instead navigates), the passengers are no longer traveling in the car, or riding in it, but instead mediating travel with a variety of electronic devices. Passengers have been mediating travel for as long as it has been com- fortable: increased comfort and speed lends itself to boredom, and travel becomes the trajective (Virilio, 1997). Even early on with rail travel, dime novels served as not only a means to pass the time, but also served as a sign that travelers did not wish to engage in conversation with other passengers (Schivelbusch, 1987). In this sense, media has served as a way to screen out certain elements of travel for more than 150 years. In the 1950s, when the car was beginning to reach market saturation in the United States, media storage remained rather bulky, with music primarily stored in disk/album form and movies on film. With the playback of visual information unavail- able in the car because of these limitations, the only options are to see the fleeting—the road—as the only real-time visual. The billboard long served as a commercialized means of not only announcing where and how to spend one’s money or alter one’s itinerary, they also conveyed regional cultural character (Gudis, 2004). Specific roads such as Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles (Finch, 1993) or the Las Vegas Strip (Venturi, Izenour, & Brown, 1977) were themselves new media in which architecture and signage combined to accommodate the speed at which and screens through which the automotive audience spectated. Stopping the vehicle, however, afforded new visual sensations, from the portable television to the drive-in theater. A September 15, 1956 article in the Saturday Evening Post discussing the development of “open theaters” captures the notion of a moving demo- graphic, quoting Universal-International Pictures executive David Lipton as explaining that the movie industry accepts drive in theaters as “a phe- nomenon of the motor age, here to stay, so we might as well like it” (Taylor, p. 102). At the drive-in, the car becomes living room, the seats couches, and the windshield a surface of entertainment rather than navigation. At the same time as the car entered the cinema assemblage of the drive-in, Lynn Spigel (2001) identified a shift from the era of the home theater in the 1950s to the era of the mobile home in the 1960s, explaining that the portable television “promised to take the interior world outdoors” in what she calls “privatized Screening Technologies 321 mobility” (p. 391). Spigel argued that privatized mobility demonstrates a shift toward seeing the home itself as “a mode of transport in and of itself that allowed people to take private life outdoors” (p. 392), rather than bring the outside in. Although Spigel discussed the ways that televisions were freed from their consoles in the 1960s, becoming more easily transportable, it is important to remember that (like drive-ins) these are not mobile media; they are portable media. Although portable televisions enable the domestic inte- rior outdoors and the drive-in situates the car itself as portable domestic interior, mobile media suggest a move to consumption on the move. With the advent of the microchip and advances in battery technology, handheld mobile devices opened up new avenues for passenger entertain- ment. In 1963, RCA announced a prototype handheld television that was developed out of a trend toward miniaturization as part of the long march to technological progress tied to Cold War tensions and the race to the moon. Still, with a lack of storage, whatever is watched must be tuned-in. Like the instrument panel serves the needs of the driver, these portable technologies serve the passenger, and in so doing (particularly when these devices have headphones) reduce noise for the driver. As storage capacity of visual media became more mobile with mag- netic tape, the VCR began to find its way into vans, minivans, travel trailers, and motor homes. Portable DVD players hit the consumer market in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and television shows such as “Pimp My Ride” regularly featured overhauls of cars that featured (in addition to upgraded sounds systems) multiple LCD installations. Although the LCD is not a feature standard in the majority of cars, it is a common factory option in minivans and over-seat mounts are increasingly affordable. As screens become more prevalent and screen size increases, there is an increased potential for what is viewed inside the car to be seen outside of it (particularly at night), a point of concern for parents of young children with eyes that wander to screens in other vehicles. Laws on viewing pornography in public places aside, perhaps the best strategy to secure children is through holding their gaze on a closer and larger screen: a screen inside the car to end all curiosity outside of it. As developments in storage capacity and wireless connectivity increases, the amount of media accessible from the vehicle grows expo- nentially. On the heels of an expanding market for personal electronic devices taking off with the Sony Walkman in the 1980s (see Du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1997), the early 1990s was witness to an explosion in portable video gaming with the U.S. release of the Nintendo GameBoy in 1989 and the Sega Game Gear in 1991. Similar to the Walkman, these game systems are personal and, although detached from the car, can often be found there. These devices brought a new visual and auditory distraction from the road as well as from other passengers in the vehicle (such as parents) and the tedium of sing-alongs, mad-libs, and travel-edition board games with magnetic pieces. These hand-held devices—individual 322 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald interactive entertainment—can be seen in some senses as training a gener- ation of mobile media citizens to use GPS units, smart phones, and tablets while mobile. These devices not only fill the car with new sensations, but also add more accurately personalized sensations that create increased indi- viduation between passengers. We no longer travel in the family car as a family, but rather in a mobile media library as obedient patrons. In the car then, there is a dual move to insulate and isolate driver and passengers from both environmental and social elements. As the driver is insulated from the road, sensation is replaced with information through a variety of screens: windscreens, gauges, electronic displays and indicators, and navigation aids such as GPS units. With a void in sensation, passengers kill and fill the time with a variety of devices made possible by advances in processing power, storage capacity, battery life, and connectivity. Travel becomes the trajective. Journeys can be augmented, accompanied by, or in fact replaced with televisual journeys. Pocket technologies transforming pas- sengers into packets: the family unit dematerialized in transport, only to be rematerialized as family at the destination. Transportation becomes telepor- tation as the experience of travel is displaced by a multitude of individually mediated televisual journeys. Moving without traveling.

Highway Hi-Fi or Making Music Auto-Mobile Increasingly sheltered from the elements, passengers can now trade the shock and jolt of the road for the pace and rhythm of music. The mechaniza- tion of mass music reproduction and the extension of aural communication through radio broadcast radically changed how automobility (and mobility more generally) has come to be practiced and experienced. Although some historical work exists on the topic and a great deal of work looks to how such technologies affected home life, much remains to be done. Williams (2003) explained that broadcast was the dominant media model correspond- ing to mobile privatization. The following section mines a specific vein of this history in order to examine the history of communication technologies as an element of the shift from mobile privatization to screening technolo- gies. We see such changes taking place in terms of content control, mobility, storage capacity, translatability, and interactivity of audio media in the car. While the first portable AM radio was introduced in 1926, audio entered the automobile in a significant way beginning with the 1929 introduction of the Motorola, a radio designed with mobility rather than portability in mind (Silva & Huijsing, 2008, p. 5). The Motorola car radio was not only the first car radio; it was also the product from which the electronics giant that continues to thrive in mobile technologies derived its corporate name. Over the next eighty years numerous advances in the mobility of musical media allow for an understanding of how screening technologies come to be used and organized. What follows is a brief investigation of these advances. Screening Technologies 323

Some of the key tendencies which we are unraveling are clearly atten- tive to the car radio, most notably mobility and content control. The car radio mobilizes radio broadcast reception and vastly expands the audience. Radio leaves the home and electrical grid behind and can from then on be heard anywhere an automobile and radio signal intersect. We argue that this is the most overlooked event in the early history of mobile commu- nications. Many of these newly created points of reception existed on city streets, but they were mostly the two-track channels of dirt roads that made up the majority of the U.S. Highway System that had been officially sanc- tioned in 1925. The automobile provided not only the power and space to move the radio, but the electricity needed to use it. This mix of mobility, space, and electricity made the car an ideal space for early adoption of later mobile communications technologies. The tuning of radios marked a partic- ular point of difficulty while driving and limited the ability to control content to the degree that one considers choosing amongst broadcast stations con- trol. Several innovations were aimed at overcoming the task of separating out broadcast messages from the noise filling the radio airwaves. Silva and Huijsing (2008) identified a range of early developments tied to tuning, including push-button tuning and steel rod antennas in 1937, the telescoping antenna a year later, and the “first successful signal seeking radio” in 1947 (p. 7). An example of such innovations can be seen in the 1953 advertisement for AC Delco’s signal-seeking radio, and trends in automatic tuning continued to grow in popularity and complexity with the advent of digital tuners in the late 1970s and advances in the late 1990s and early 2000s for tuning terrestrial and satellite digital signals. Removing fingers from the equation, Zenith introduced hands-free controls shortly after World War II as a war development that is “convenient, instantaneous, and safe” (p. 1). This feature never really caught on, but a similar safety convenience is introduced through steering wheel controls in the late 1980s and later with voice in the mid-2000s. A next step toward full freedom is algorithmic control in which music (or audio content more generally) is chosen for the driver on the basis of collated patterns of previous behavior and data culled from like-minded others, as with iTunes’ “Genius” feature. As tubes gave way to transistors and then analog tuning to digital, greater capacity for flexibility and control arose. The mechanical limits for automation, selectivity, and memory are explored in each technological period and then reworked anew. Yet these changes occur primarily because of changes in radio-receiver technologies. When the signal itself changes from analog to digital with satellite radio, high-definition radio, and Internet radio, a new host of features and capacities are added. The first two advances allow for greater in-car freedom, whereas the latter allows for more interactivity and thus the freedom from the tyranny of lim- ited selection opens onto the potentiality for the tyranny of external control. The other significant shift in highway hi-fi has to do with the increasing portability and storage capacity of mechanically reproduced audio media. 324 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald

Such increases are immense and the automobile is a primary agent in these developments. We use the term agent deliberately, following Bruno Latour’s (2005) conceptualization of agency in which technologies can be said to exert force upon actions and change. Some of these increases are attempts to make home-designed media mobile, such as in-car record players, whereas others are specifically developed for the car, as with what came to be known as the 8-track. Although there were several changes in the dominant form of record playback technologies with changes in rotation speeds, disc size, and hence disc capacity, the primary change for us is not that of form, but of capacity and control. The vinyl record provided a mechanism by which a sense of choice, at first in time, but eventually also over space could occur. Although eventually prerecorded music would come to dominate what was available, many other types of material (e.g., speeches, theatrical perfor- mances, self-help, educational directives, novels) have been available to greater and lesser extent over the years. Coinciding with this increased control was a shift from the radio as merely a receiver of one-time transmission to a system demanding the storage (in disc form) of material for multi-time use. The ability to access analogically stored data (music) called for storage capacity (a “record collec- tion”). Thus, the shift from one format to another (78 r.p.m. 10” disc to the 45 r.p.m. 7” disc to the 33 1/3 r.p.m. 12” disc) increased the immediate storage per unit, it also created new storage capacity challenges in the home; where to store the storage devices? Record cabinets, hi-fi systems, and eventually hi-fi or stereo consoles with record slots or shelves are developed. The stor- age capacity and economic conditions for radio broadcast stations obviously exceed that of the single-family home thus enabling a wider expanse of content, but with a single delivery channel. Thus, although radio loses out for the individual in terms of content control, increased capacity of potential content is much greater. A second related problem of the record player might be thought of in terms of mobility. Even as the length of a record was expanded to the vicinity of 45 minutes with the long play 12” record (LP), it still meant that a listener was mobilized by the machinery to turn over the disc or place a new one on the platter frequently, as opposed to the listener controlling the movement of the record player. And obviously in the case of shorter playing discs the intervals were vastly decreased. Although we might see this as a form of interactivity in which the phonograph asserts its desire for constant attention, we are more interested in using this example to point toward attempts at remote-control and relative mobility through automation. Several automated record changing devices were developed that would increase the length of time music could be played without attending to the device by allowing stacks of records to be placed on the machine at once which would be dropped and played one after another until the complete stack had run its course. Thus, the relationship between mobility, agency, capacity, and Screening Technologies 325 control are uniquely figured by the in-home record player. Such capacities for automobility are far different. Although the radio made a fairly easy transition to the automobile, the record player did not fare as well. There were two serious attempts by major electronics manufacturers and recording companies to integrate the record player into the automobile, but both were clear failures. Each depended upon automated stackable units, to free the driver from having to attend to the device. Both also worked on the principle of miniaturization, a key ele- ment in mobility, by using 7” discs. The first was initiated in 1956 by Chrysler in conjunction with Columbia Records. Their device fit under the dash and extended the data storage capacity through compression and slowing the revolutions per minute down to 16 2/3 making for a 7” record that could hold more than 20 min of sound data per side. The creation of a new single- usemedia(the162/3 r.p.m., 7” record), that was exclusively manufactured by Columbia Records, and limited to only 20 titles presented several obvious shortcomings. The highway hi-fi system, as it was marketed, passed out of production after only 2 years. The second automobile vinyl playback system was introduced in 1960, again by Chrysler, but this time in conjunction with RCA. This short excerpt from one of their sales brochures sums up the appeal and technological features: “To make it possible in Plymouth, RCA perfected an unusual auto- matic record player that fits handsomely within reach, right under Plymouth’s instrument panel” (Plymouth Chrysler Corporation, 1956, p. 23). The brochure makes clear that Chrysler and RCA were trying to make music mobile through three considerations: storage capacity, automation, and content control. The device defeated the compatibility problem, but, as with its predecessor, it was unable to negate the agency of the road system. Unfortunately, few roads were smooth enough to give their consent. As noted, while vinyl records could be moved, they could not be played while moving. Hence the growing collections of records in U.S. homes could not be made auto-mobile. Other home- or commercially based audio media, such as reel-to-reel tape and wire recordings, were seen as too bulky or having too few adherents to make the transition to the automobile. The problem for analog was in part that the most popular mechanisms of trans- lation (recording to tape, cut into vinyl, played back on a delicate machine) of the LP need a further analog translation to cassette before the control and storage capacity of the home begins to get played out in the automobile. So, although the home sees a growth in capacity (both in quantity of LPs and in the fidelity of the sound), the automobile will spawn a different media that will move into the home. The 8-track, explicitly designed to be a mobile mechanism for the automobile and the jet, initially appeared in two competing forms. Two com- peting systems were developed: one by the Learjet Company first to be used in their own jets, but then made a custom feature in Ford’s beginning in 1966, 326 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald and a second by the Muntz Corporation that was uniquely situated to take advantage of their television manufacturing businesses and automotive deal- erships. The Muntz Stereo-Pak was based on the radio industry’s standard recording tape, the Fidelipac, which was used for jingles and advertisements and was something of a fad with the Hollywood set in the early 1960s. Entrepreneur Earl “Madman” Muntz of Los Angeles, California saw a poten- tial in these broadcast cartridges for an automobile music tape system, and in 1962, he introduced his “Stereo-Pak 4-Track Stereo Tape Cartridge System” and prerecorded tapes, initially in California and Florida. He licensed pop- ular music albums from major record companies and duplicated them on these 4-track cartridges, or CARtridges, as they were first advertised. All such versions run on an endless loop in only one direction, but 1 have numerous tracks across the /4” tape. Thus by moving the tape-head across the tape, different tracks can be heard at the same time, and someone listening to an 8-track in the car could access four different stereo tracks, or songs, granting a second degree of control within the tape. The 8-track home players started to appear in 1966, just a year after they were introduced into cars. By 1966, all Ford vehicles had the option of the 8-track upgrade. Similar to the later VHS/Beta wars, the lesser technology—in terms of fidelity or quality—won out as a result of a consortium of business investments and user-end features: There was no lever to pull to change tracks; they changed automatically. Stereo 8 tapes and players developed a reputation for unreliability, mostly because of failures of splicing and the phenomenon of having the player “eat” the tape. The auto environment, with its temperature extremes, vibration, dust, and so on, caused many failures as well. By the mid-1970s, the cassette tape had become a fixture within the realm of home hi-fi and portable stand-alone units that often also included a transistor radio. The ghetto blaster had yet to make its significant cultural appearance, but cassette players for automobiles were also becoming pop- ular and would by the 1980s become a standard feature in the majority of automobiles produced for the U.S. market. This was helped in part by the increased importation of Japanese cars that featured cassettes as standard into the U.S. market following fuel efficiency concerns after the OPEC oil crisis. The overarching feature of the cassette that differentiated it from both 8-track and the LP was its ability for data transfer. We mean this in two ways. First, data was easily transferred to cassette tapes from analog formats such as vinyl, radio broadcasts, other cassettes, reel-to-reel, 8-track, as well as “live” events via microphones. Digital data was also transferred and stored using cassette tapes for early personal computers. Second, cassettes were comparatively more easily transferred from place to place due to their size. The Walkman has been much discussed in these terms (Du Gay et al 1997). However, this also led to a greater storage capacity as a collection or archive in terms of the space needed to store them and the reduced cost of pirated cassettes. For instance, the common 90-min cassette tape was designed to Screening Technologies 327 hold the contents of two LP records, one per side. Cassettes simplified and enabled greater sharing across formats, leeway to mix within each unit, and to share from peer-to-peer through personalized production and reproduc- tion. One could produce a personalized mixed-tape or reproduce an LP infinitely. Without belaboring the point, the cassette initiates on a large scale a reorientation for mobile-media. It makes recording, mixing, producing, reproducing, format shifting, distributing, and listening a more mobile pro- cess. Although the advent of 8-track was a specifically auto-mobile invention that then found its way into the home, cassette tapes originated with the needs for corporate secretarial efficiency and state surveillance, but would become a game changer in how music would be strategically manipu- lated and used for the practices of everyday life. Cassette also allowed for a reorientation of the spatial and temporal ordering of previous media. Radio broadcasts could be recorded, stripped of their immediacy, stored indefinitely, and played out of spatial and temporal context. LP’s organi- zational structure could be undone, redone, or thrown out altogether. The album—in particular, the concept album—could be negated as an artistic enterprise, while the whole industry worried that commercially produced music would be nullified as a profitable enterprise. To a great extent this con- cern was mollified by making commercially produced cassettes the medium of choice. First cassette sales overtook 8-track and then they even outsold LPs. However, this dominance did not last long, because the CD would soon overtake both LP and cassette sales. Before all of these market changes, time, space, and format shifting became cultural fixtures for the cassette generation. In terms of the automobile, the cassette became the means by which home-based data (LPs in particular) were stored and transferred. This trans- fer negated the temporal bias of the LP and set it free to roam, mutate, and proliferate. The cassette player personalized the automobile and really made highway hi-fi a desirable potentiality, because it allowed content control via enhanced storage capacity and increased mobility. Further, new genres that never truly worked commercially for LP or 8-track became viable such as books on cassette that were well suited to auto-mobile listening. It could further be argued that the growth in musical content control weakened the hegemony of music-based radio broadcast, thus opening up a space for the growth in new genres such as talk radio. The changes effectuated by cassette upon auto-mobile audio are more far-reaching than might at first be thought. The shift to digital was introduced via the compact disc or CD. As with the LP record player, the first instantiation was for home and radio sta- tion use, with first-generation units being introduced to the North American markets in the early 1980s. CD was not seen as an addendum to LPs, but an upgrade, allegedly providing perfect sound forever. CD players and eventually disk changers brought about greater content control, storage 328 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald capacity—and to a degree, lightness—but the ability to share peer-to-peer and produce mix CDs takes quite some time and does not reach very high saturation until personal computers outfitted with optical disk drive recorders (more commonly know as burners) come into the picture in the late 1990s, which, taken together with file sharing, provide another game changer with the seemingly ubiquitous use of MP3 files by the late 1990s. Through compression and peer-to-peer online file sharing, storage capacity, mobility, content control, and reproducibility exceed anything reasonably possible through either the cassette tape or writable disk (although the CD works as an intermediary transfer mechanism for MP3 in the early establish- ment of its dominance). It is precisely this portability that Jonathan Sterne (2006) argued has led to its dominance even though it is a sonically inferior medium. One considerable problem was that of data or content transfer from analog to digital. However, once material was digital (as with CD) transfer- ability between formats was incredibly simplified. Most playback devices decipher numerous forms of encryption and compression. Although trans- ferring analog data from an LP to a digital file could generally only be done in real time via hands-on apparatuses, digital transfers and reproductions came to be nearly instantaneous and fully automated. For our purposes, this leads to the introduction of MP3 compatibility within the automobile. An obvious effect of this is an immense increase of storage capacity. An audiophile LP can weigh up to 180 grams, be stored in a nongatefold sleeve that measures 12.25” × 12.25” × .125” and averages 45 min of audio content, whereas the most recent (2010) version of Apple’s iPod Shuffle weighs less than 11 grams, is 1.8” × 0.7” × 0.3” and can hold approxi- mately 4,000 min of audio content. The weight-to-data ratio for the Shuffle is about 1,600 times more efficient than the high-quality LP as a storage device. Furthermore, whereas the LP is merely a storage device, the Shuffle is both that and a media delivery system. But even compared with the 5” diameter CD, weighing 16.4 grams, and holding approximately 74 minutes of no-loss content, although about one fourth of the MP3 data in the Shuffle, there is still a weight-to-data ratio efficiency gain of nearly a factor of seven. Again, the CD is merely a storage device and not a delivery medium. Yet all of this digital discussion of storage capacity and content control pales significantly in comparison to an in-car Internet-laden media device that, in theory, has access to all the music available in the vast collective “data cloud.” Storage capacity in such a scenario borders on the infinite. Or, in lived terms, given human life expectancy, we can safely say that it is impos- sible to listen to all the musical content available in the data-cloud during any human lifetime—at least, in real time. This leads us to argue that the cutting edge of making music mobile was very often the result of making music auto-mobile. Controlling the audio- sphere of the autosphere has driven the consumer market for new forms of audio storage and playback. Just as it makes sense to think of the car phone Screening Technologies 329 as the precursor to the mobile phone, it is necessary to recognize the auto- mobile, just as much as the Walkman, as the predecessor to the iPod. Recent trends indicate that cars be made compatible with the most prevalent form of mobile media, the iPod, the iPhone, or other-brand MP3 players. New forms of Bluetooth and iSync technologies allow personal audio devices to connect wirelessly and automatically with automobiles. The automobile is no longer an audio storage device, but merely a conduit or amplifier for more mobile, more personalized devices. The tag line for a recent Nissan advertising cam- paign was “The 2010 Nissan Cube. Personalize. Share. Connect.” More to the point, the head of Nissan creative agency’s description of their Cube made such a comparison even more apparent: “So we decided we wouldn’t think about it as a car,” he added, but rather “position it as designed to bring young people together—like every mobile device they have” (Elliott, 2009).

The Automobile Network

Taken together, ubiquitous computer control, distributed internal con- nectivity, and telematics interfaces increasingly combine to provide an application software platform with external network access. There are thus ample reasons to reconsider the state of vehicular computer security. (Koscher et al., 2010, p. 3)

In 1974 when Williams (2003) first discussed mobile privatization, the net- work in which the automobile and broadcast communications was oriented was that of work, home, and nation. The automobile provided the con- nective technology that linked the home to circuits of consumption and production while broadcast television maintained links between the nation and the increasingly disparate suburban homes. This communicative net- work was fairly well circumscribed, and the automobile played a rather straightforward role. The communicative capacities and expectations were largely oriented by the immediacy of local surroundings, whether they be local broadcast radio or car-to-car communications (e.g., turn indica- tors) to allow for safe passage. One of the earliest communication devices that allowed drivers to communicate with other elements of the outside world, the electronic garage door opener, further instantiated the role of the automobile as a privatized people mover with direct links to a sub- urban model of citizenship cut off from any public experience of space. Although an exhaustive account of all of the historical developments in automotive communication would lead us astray from our focus here on screening technologies, we subsequently discuss the emerging network into which the automobile has become a featured node. This network, as one would expect, is global in scope, highly immersive, and intricately tied up with other interlinked mobile devices. A triple displacement is at work 330 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald here: First, the driver was distanced from the road environment; second, the driver displaced the vacuum of sensation with entertainment and advanced information systems; and third, these systems have developed into networks that work to displace the driver from . . . driving. Cars are arguably one of the most immersive environments that we have today. The car has become increasingly automated, from automatic transmis- sion and climate control to antilock braking systems and “Active Park Assist.” As with other forms of transport (e.g., trains, ships, airplanes) the work of navigating and controlling vehicles is being given over to increasingly sophisticated forms of communication, location, and information systems. Such systems have also become increasingly networked. In this section, we consider the automobile network in three regards: first, as tied with the communications network; second, as a material infrastructure for transport- ing people and goods and as a circuit between home and work; and last, and most important, we look to the information network within the automobile. As drivers began to fill roads in the early 1900s, a new crisis of mobil- ity was at hand: How should movement be managed as more vehicles enter already busy thoroughfares? Numerous forms of communication were developed to assist interdriver communication, including signs, turn indica- tors, traffic lights, horns, and other novel mechanisms for overcoming the noise introduced into the communicative environment by engines, roads, pedestrians, speed, and the dark of night. It could be argued that more recently, rather than engaging in two-way communication, drivers act more like pack animals, signaling intent or danger via turn signals and horns (horn derived from horn of an animal) to which other drivers respond only with movement or lack of movement. In the cases that drivers communicate via nonmachine signals (e.g., voice, hand gestures), it has become generally understood/categorized as road rage. We are instructed not to pull over and assist other drivers in need, pick up hitchhikers, or scream out the window. Existing as mobile herd, the driving mass is occasioned by packs or preda- tory drivers and responds to basic signaling. We have indeed not come far in regard to a community of the road. But how much more can one expect as far as civility is concerned when drivers and passengers choose alternate platforms inside the vehicle (music, entertainment, conversation) in which to be civilized? Williams (2003) did not address such communicative chal- lenges in his formulation of suburb and citizenship, although it could be argued that mobile privatization equally depended on the telephone as it did on the car and broadcast television. Claude Fischer (1992), in his social history of the telephone in the United States, frequently looked to the automobile as a counterbalance and point of contrast to the telephone. Explaining that the government played a large role in subsidizing automobile infrastructure in contrast with the hands-off role that they played in the development of the telephone (inter- vening mainly in the form of allowing a natural monopoly for telephone Screening Technologies 331 service), he demonstrated how these two technologies co-evolved over the course of their early development. Fischer situated the telephone and automobile as contributing to an increased “privatism,” which, rather than focusing on an isolation from the outside, stresses “the participation in and valuation of private social worlds as opposed to the larger public commu- nity” (p. 265). The telephone was vital to the maintenance of individualized social ties as the television worked to maintain more extensive ties to locale or nation. Williams’ analysis could have benefited from inclusion of the tele- phone as a vital element in the establishment of mobile privatization. Once the telephone becomes mobile, the calculus for interlinking home, produc- tion, consumption, and nation radically changes. In the intermediary period, we find another technology entering the automobile that also reorients that automobile communications network: Citizens Band Radio (CB). Although we will not go into much historical detail regarding CB, we gesture toward it as a way of thinking about the expansion of an automotive communications network. What CB allowed for was the ability to speak to other drivers (as well as a far smaller number of home users) and to cre- ate a roving communication and information network that most often dealt specifically with driving conditions, scenarios, and concerns. CBs’ range was limited to about 2–5 miles, but it was an open system in which anyone with a CB receiver could respond. Unlike later cell phone use in which a specific number is needed to reach anyone, CB was a much more public form of communication. This openness operated much more along the lines of a network than cell phones and was lauded for this characteristic. Further, it did not depend on commercial carriers or commercial content, but rather it was entirely the product of its users. Hence, the network grew in size as more people used CB, and the range of content did as well. Last, unlike car phone use, which was primarily envisioned as a means for extending con- tact with the home and workplace, thus intensifying the dual connection that Williams described in terms of mobile privatization, CBs reorient the road as a place of conversation with fellow drivers. Such conversational culture was seen as a mechanism for breaking the corporate control of broadcast media (Packer, 2002). A specific site for understanding the changing nature of mobile com- munication is through the lens of the development of the cellular phone. One way in which to think of this evolution is through an understanding of the development of cellular networks and protocols—from 0G or pre- cellular networks through to today’s expanding 3G and 4G networks that enable mobile broadband and are considered in some cases as competi- tion for wire-line information services. Because our focus here has been largely material and user oriented, we have looked to the actual devices that come to serve as the “last mile” of mobile communication networks: radios, handsets, devices, and screens. 332 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald

Early car phones consisted of a radio transmitter and a large logic unit inside the trunk that enabled the car to connect to the larger telephone network. These units remained car-bound until the microchip reduced “logic units” to a fraction of their former size, leading into the development of the cell phone. Cell phones are known as such because of the organiza- tion of the physical infrastructure that makes the network operate, rather than coming from something that has actually to do with the device. A cell phone works by switching from tower to tower while mobile (The area of each tower constitutes a “cell,” and this is a new configuration of space). While the car phone was named for the place it was installed and used, the cell phone is named for the new configurations of space that infrastructure makes possible. As long as we are in range of one of these towers, or in a cell, we can communicate. The area in which a caller must be enclosed to communicate has become large and invisible, but constitutes a boundary nonetheless. While a history of cell network development and device design shows a move from large units that necessitate the car as a user environ- ment moving to smaller portable devices that move on the person rather than with the car, these devices are nonetheless used in cars. What we focus on here, however, is not simply technologies originating in and found inside the automobile, but rather within it—returning to the idea of instrumenta- tion and entertainment, we next discuss the networks under the hood, so to speak, to explore the ways that the automobile lets us know what it is doing. The infrastructure of automobility is often discussed in terms of inter- states, freeways, turnpikes, collector and local roads as well as fuel racks, rest stops, and gas stations. The fuel that drives the automobility system, even as hybrid and electric vehicles take to the roads in increasing numbers, is still refined from oil that comes from the contentious Middle East. As the Oil Crises of 1973 and 1979 illustrated, and as we are well aware of today, we are largely dependent on foreign oil. The 2010 British Petroleum (BP) spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and offshore drilling more largely demonstrate our continued and increased reliance on fossil fuels. These are all issues of which we are aware, and deserve much continued discussion and reflection, but are not the automobility infrastructure that we will discuss here. Instead, consider the miles of wiring in the car and dozens of electronic control units that serve as the electronic infrastructure for an average automobile. A 2002 article in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Computer noted that high-end cars in 2002 can be fitted with somewhere in the neigh- borhood of 4 km of wiring, up from about 45 meters from mid-1950s models (Leen & Heffernan, p. 88). As for electronic control units, current low-end vehicles have 30–50, whereas luxury cars have approximately 70–100, run- ning about 100 million lines of code, a figure expected to surge to 200–300 million in the near future (Charette, 2009). Mechanical systems are being Screening Technologies 333 replaced with electronic ones, such as drive-by-wire, and some cars are fit- ted with a different kind of “e brake”: not an “emergency” brake, but an “electronic parking brake”. Even in an emergency, in electronics we trust. A recent article in Assembly Magazine discusses the actual role of wire in drive-by-wire systems (also known as “x-by-wire”), noting that while func- tions will be increasingly automated, this does not necessarily mean more wire. The article quotes Todd Hubing of Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research as explaining that the move to digital data enables more information to be sent over fewer lines: “Digital data trans- mission requires more expensive electronics, but it reduces the amount of wiring...Asthecostofwirecontinues to rise and the cost of electronics continues to fall, we’ll see more and more data exchanged digitally” (Weber, 2010, para. 4). As the automobile moves away from the analog and toward the digital, we see that the car itself has become more than a launch site for screening technologies. In fact, it has its own network, a fine mesh of wires, sensors, and control units, and has become a screen. Although storage and access in terms of the car itself can be thought of in terms of trunk and cabin space, and mobility is its raison d’être, interac- tivity and control take on new meaning as sensors converge into systems, and the car becomes informational space. One sure sign of this informa- tionalization is that some of these services—Ford SYNC, Kia UVO, and Fiat Blue&MeTM—share a common platform: Microsoft Auto. The product site for Microsoft Auto 4.1 explains that the vision for the product is to “enrich the in-vehicle experience for drivers and passengers by bringing an industry leading platform software and services for communication, entertainment, navigation and information services to the mass market” (Microsoft, 2010). Although this and other platforms serve information, navigation, and enter- tainment purposes, it is important to reflect back on those thousands of feet of wiring that are being reduced thanks to digitization. They aren’t all alive with the sounds of the stereo, or powering your GPS. They are enabling the driver to operate the car. It is interesting to note that the information network in the car could also be what takes control away from the driver. Key functions are carried out through automatic and electronic processes. These processes are com- municated through a network in the car that has not been conceived as a site of security, but rather one of safety. In a recent The New York Times arti- cle summarizing a report by the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, Markoff (2010) discussed the increased risk for cyberattacks in net- worked vehicles. Researchers testing a recent model car (make and model not disclosed) “were able to activate dozens of functions and almost all of them while the car was in motion” (para. 9). The abstract for the report “Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile” claimed the following: 334 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald

Over a range of experiments, both in the lab and in road tests, we demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automo- tive functions and completely ignore driver input—including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on (Koscher et al., 2010, p. 1).

Although the automobile long remained unchanged, they explain, the past two decades have seen a revolution in control systems and comput- ers that “coordinate and monitor sensors, components, the driver, and the passengers” (p. 1). They explained that the On-Board Diagnostics port man- dated by the U.S. government is the interface to the internal networks of the vehicle, and it is often linked with other networks in the car such as audio systems, wireless networks (e.g., Bluetooth) and systems such as OnStar. They warned that as these systems continue to grow—citing moves to “car as a platform” (p. 1) and the creation of car-specific applications— they are at increased risk for attack. Through lab and road environment tests, the researchers were able to cause a number of potentially dangerous disruptions to driver operation:

Indeed, we have demonstrated the ability to systematically control a wide array of components including engine, brakes, heating and cool- ing, lights, instrument panel, radio, locks, and so on. Combining these we have been able to mount attacks that represent potentially signif- icant threats to personal safety. For example, we are able to forcibly and completely disengage the brakes while driving, making it difficult for the driver to stop. Conversely, we are able to forcibly activate the brakes, lurching the driver forward and causing the car to stop suddenly. (Koscher et al., p. 2)

The report explained that while engine control units began to enter cars in the 1970s to monitor gas-to-oxygen ratios in engines and increase fuel efficiency (largely driven by legislation), today’s vehicles contain many elec- tronic control units that run everything from interior lights to audio systems. These electronic control units are networked in order to perform many of the automatic functions that drivers have come to expect in cars from antilock braking systems and cruise control to a variety of new features such as automatic parallel parking and lane assist. Seeing the car as a network, the researchers examined to the ways that malicious code (entered either physi- cally through access to the vehicle or remotely through wireless connections) can affect the security of the network. Koscher et al. (2010) were able to control a variety of systems and create some uncomfortable as well as dangerous conditions. Accessing the audio system, they were able to take control of the radio and volume as well as access climate control, internal and external lights, locks, and windows. They Screening Technologies 335 were also able to access the instrumentation displaying false readings (such as the car speed as 140 m.p.h. when a car was in park). More frightening are the tests in which they were able to increase and decrease the speed of the vehicle as well as disable or slam brakes. Complete denial-of-service attacks can completely “crash” the car’s network, which could lead to a car “crash.” The researchers reported that “while automotive components are clearly and explicitlydesignedtosafelytoleratefailures...itseemsclearthattolerating attacks has not been part of the same design criteria” (p. 14). While they outline a number of the issues, they don’t provide solutions, arguing that their experimental work is “a critical piece of the puzzle” (p. 15). In Koscher et al.’s report, they referred to an “attack iPod” as a vector for the deployment of malicious code, and although they do not go into detail about the ways this device was made to serve nefarious ends, there is a certain irony as to the form of the attack. Reflecting on the significance of this is crucial. Although previously the relative safety of automobility was oriented as a public safety concern, it has more recently been reoriented in terms of national security (Packer, 2006). Such an understanding depended on governing all cars as if they might become car bombs. The car bomb in such cases was still seen as depending on a malevolent driver controlling the car from the driver seat. However, these new concerns over automotive security reconfigure the automotive agency as being up for grabs. If any automobile can be hacked and remotely controlled, all cars could become remotely controlled weapons. As Virilio (1997) made clear, every technology creates its own accident. The automobile network creates a driving environ- ment in which an individual and his or her vehicle are threatened not only by careless drivers, but also by distant unknown forces enabled by the same technologies meant to save that individual.

CONCLUSION

It is important to note that in our explanation of screening technologies, it is not only a matter of control but also one of connection—a sort of networked control, in which control is exerted by, on, and through each node, each privately or publicly mobile user, as they move from orbit to orbit. Perhaps what is most pressing is to create new ways to screen what or who is screening us, to understand the nature of the relations that the newly networked space of the automobile enables and attracts. This is of critical import: If the car becomes an open site, then it can be taken over externally. Imagine bumper cars when the juice stops flowing and the ride is over. Or Kahn’s wrath when, after successfully commandeering a Starfleet science vessel, Kirk and Spock seize control of the bridge remotely, lowering his shields and blowing him to bits. Imagine, for a moment, your car going Christine, possessed by an unknown and evil force from beyond. 336 J. Packer and K. F. Oswald

Automobiles will become increasingly networked, personal, and flex- ible. They will require bandwidth. Because the driver is faced with an increasing number of screens—not just an instrument cluster, but one with lever or voice-operated menus; not just a cassette, but a music library; no longer a book on tape, but Internet access—the automobile itself has become a screening technology, an informationalized, interactive and converged digital mobile network whose use is monitored and governed through its screens. Cars have added not only storage capacity because of their increased size, but also because of digitization and being networked. Drivers, passengers, luggage, and data are all stored and transported. Yet, screening technologies are not only present in the automobile. Screening technologies are the portals by which mobility and immobility increasingly come into being. Money, bodies, goods, noise, culture, and cars are but a few of the forms organized and given direction by screening technologies. Mobile communication is in a way a redundancy in terminology. Couldn’t either term suffice? But as long as scholars work to make sense of “it,” we suggest orienting such scholarship in terms of the apparatuses that organize mobile thought and conduct.

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