(the following text is an unedited version of an article published in CARL magazine)
Once our morning rituals are over, most of us join a network of millions of other people travelling to their destinations by various means of transport. Despite all the efforts of well-meaning awareness campaigns and environmental activism, it is still cars that rank among the most ubiquitous technological creations of humankind on the city’s traffic arteries. While for professional drivers of taxis, lorries or buses driving is a source of livelihood, ordinary drivers of passenger cars have more freedom to choose alternative and more environmentally friendly modes of transport. And yet they do not. It would be easy to accuse them of indifference, laziness or excessive love of comfort. But is driving a car really more comfortable than going to work by metro or tram? And is there not something much more interesting hidden behind the unceasing urge to drive a car, something that reveals details about the intimate relationship between human beings and technology?
If we look “under the bonnet” of how a car is driven through the eyes of a beginner, we find that it is not an activity that a lazy, overly comfort-loving person would undertake voluntarily. Even before getting in, the driver has to check the outward condition of the vehicle and make sure it shows no obvious signs of a problem. After getting into the vehicle and sinking into the mix of smells of the interior materials, the driver checks the mirrors and nowadays commonly fixes a smart device with GPS functions to the middle of the dashboard. After starting the engine, with precise coordination of feet, hands and eyes, the driver brings the parked car onto the road without endangering themselves or other road users. That is only the beginning. Throughout the journey the driver has to watch, directly and peripherally, what is happening around the vehicle and interpret the meaning and context of the signs on the road signs that define the conventional rules of road traffic. While changing gears and pressing the accelerator and the brake, the driver calculates in their head the movement of the individual objects on the road and predicts possible problems that will need to be avoided. All of this on the go, so to speak, while chatting with a passenger or at least listening to the new episode of a favourite podcast. Finally, to all those who have been through driving school, there is no need to mention that one of the hardest things about driving a car, parking, always awaits as a bittersweet full stop at the end of the journey.
This brief genealogy of how to get from point A to point B by car points to two things. Firstly, driving is far from comfortable, for it is a physically and mentally demanding activity that requires constant attention and spatial intelligence. Secondly, the description above bears no resemblance at all to how an experienced driver experiences a car journey.
It is a description that is much closer to the relationship to driving and to the car that novice drivers, men and women, have when they are just attending driving school. The car appears to them as a rigid mass on four wheels, too complicated for them to understand. All those traffic rules and signs, which are an integral part of knowing how to drive, are separate sentences that driving school students have to memorise by heart. Everything is separate and disparate. Beginning drivers are able to operate the car only by following explicit instructions that sound simple but are in fact hard to carry out. The rift between theory and practice could not be greater. For the beginner, the car is an alien object that resists being subdued.
This negative, fear-filled relationship to the car, however, begins to change with growing experience. The driver is suddenly able to apply the learned procedures in practice much more smoothly. They notice less and less which foot they press the accelerator with or where exactly they hold the steering wheel, and concentrate more on what is happening in the streets. They are able to concentrate on the passenger’s words without a guilty conscience, for they know that they have the driving of the car under control. The car as such ceases to be an obstacle and disappears from the driver’s field of view. Instead of a solid object, the car turns into a transparent medium that mediates the driver’s relationship with the outside world. As Mark Weiser, the theorist of ubiquitous computing, would say, the most profound technological creations of humankind are those that disappear and escape our active awareness, because they “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”.
The experienced driver, as a “car user”, is thus not fundamentally different from an experienced player of computer games or a long-term user of a smart device such as the iPhone. The steering wheel, like the mouse and keyboard or the touchscreen, serves the users of technology as a point of contact where human and technology meet. In the vocabulary of computer science and of design, not only of interactive technologies, this special place has traditionally been called the interface. We recognise the success of an interface design by the fact that it does not get in the way of the activities that are the users’ main goals: the driver wants to get to work, the computer gamer wants to shoot as many virtual enemies as possible, and finally the smartphone user does not want to admire a beautifully designed button, but simply wants to order something to eat in the app. In other words, a well-designed interface in most cases, perhaps with the exception of artistic and speculative works, should not draw attention to itself and should mask as well as possible the technical complexity hidden “under the bonnet”, be it of a computer, a smartphone or, indeed, a car. Like every good medium, the interface should mediate an uninterrupted stream of the particular user experience expected of the given technology, and so support the state known from psychological research as flow, in which people are completely immersed in the situation at hand.
Although it is the nature of an interface to conceal itself, this does not mean that the interface is entirely passive and innocent. The interface transforms the experience of reality in a certain way, because, on the basis of the designers’ decisions, it always provides only a certain slice of reality, by means of so-called affordances, that is, the functions and possibilities through which a technology announces what can be done with it. The user can, for example, turn the steering wheel or press buttons on it that control certain functions of the car. While driving, it is above all the steering wheel, but also the gear lever, that are the figurative doors into the reality “outside the windows” of the car.
The more intimate the relationship we build with a technology through frequent use, the more likely the technology is to become part of ourselves as well. Literally an extension of our cognitive skills, as it influences our mind and memory. Let us recall the well-known research on London taxi drivers, who were found to have, compared with the general population, an enlarged part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory. According to the research, the taxi drivers had an enlarged hippocampus and better spatial memory simply because, to be a good taxi driver in London, one has to find one’s way around the enormous tangle of streets of this English metropolis. A less sophisticated study of how driving a car affects a person, however, anyone can try out for themselves. It is enough to recall how many times we have witnessed an otherwise mild and well-behaved person change beyond recognition in the role of a car driver and manage to hurl a whole parade of insults at another driver, although on the street they would never say anything of the kind to anyone’s face.
The car, like other technologies, extends our biological abilities and to a certain extent changes our personality too. This contributes to the fact that driving a car transforms our perception of reality.
At present there are several experts in cognitive science who take the idea of technology as an extension of the human being and of the human mind not merely as a metaphor, but rather as a description of reality. Research with people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, for example, shows how the surrounding environment, post-it notes or even the mobile app Evernote are an artificial substitute for a memory that no longer works. For these patients technology is so essential to everyday functioning and forms such an inseparable part of their lives that deliberately breaking their phone can amount to bodily harm. Andy Clark, a philosopher of mind and the leading proponent of the extended mind theory, argues that even under ordinary conditions we should understand technologies as an integral part of our thinking. That is why, according to Clark, we are all natural-born cyborgs, that is, organisms whose biological development has been influenced by technology from the very beginning.
From this point of view, car drivers who refuse to switch to another means of transport need not be conservatives lacking interest in the environment. For them the car is not a mere neutral means of getting around the city, but an interface or medium of a way of perceiving reality, of a lifestyle, and also part of their mind. And who would voluntarily have such an important part of themselves amputated?