Eat In Your Car - January 9, 2012

Another April day in January. Apparently it will turn cold with some chance of actual snow in a couple of days, but in the meantime, these sunny days with highs in the 40s are just kind of surreal. Or like winter in much of the rest of the country.

Me and my son and Anya ended up eating Subway sandwiches in the car for supper. We were parked in the lot at HarMar Mall in Roseville, while Ingrid got some swimming in. Next to us was a minivan with a family doing the same thing, while the kids in the back seat watched something on the TV.


It used to be quite a thing to have a TV in the back of your limousine, along with the fridge and wet bar. Well, actually the last part is still quite a thing, because you need to have a hard separation between the driver and an open bottle... but the creep of stuff into the driving life hasn't come from the luxury end of things, I expect, as much as from the needs of both families with children, and professionals, who end up in the car for much of their day.

In the Wikipedia article on carputers, it notes their prevalence in police vehicles, and this makes sense: emergency vehicles in general benefit from having more robust information systems available both en route to an emergency, and once on the scene. I remember early episodes of Emergency!, the 1970's show about paramedics, were greatly concerned with how to make medicine by radio work: what do you do when you're out of range? Now, more and more, it's not the communication that's the issue, it's the formatting and organization of the huge amount of information you can both deliver and access remotely that are the issue...

Fifty years ago, it was a novelty to take the car to a drive-in and watch a movie, listening to the soundtrack on a tinny speaker that hung on your window. Now, well...

Does where we watch entertainment matter? People tend to talk about mass media vs individual or local expression, but does the scale of audience experience maybe matter as least as much as how big a net total audience any given production has? This is one of the features of television as opposed to theatrical cinema or live theater: while the entertainment product is distributed to an enormous audience, each of those audiences is quite small, and tends to duplicate existing, mostly comfortable social networks: the family, the buddies watching the game, the kids watching Sesame Street.

One question I'd like to address as this year goes on is, when we take our place-to-place movement out of the public sphere—when we watch TV while we eat dinner in a car with people we know, instead if in a restaurant surrounded by strangers, for instance—how does that affect our view of the wider world. Do we end up with a smaller world, even as the amount of world we can access remotely, increases?