The car enables enclosure of social life into mediated spectacle

Evidence

Although the car was often a major symbol of “freedom” and “mobility” throughout the twentieth century, Pope, along with numerous other theorists of urban space, demonstrates how the car has been essential for the increasing control and management of daily life, restricting the possibilities for self and society by parceling out bodies through the management of movement. With the loss of the city, the car became the primary means to experience space. The experience of “mobile privatization”—the phrase Raymond Williams coined to describe the intertwined reinvention of urban space and the rise of televisual spectacle30—shows us how the car is necessarily conjoined with a complete reframing of public and private life. The public life of urban space, in which the street, the sidewalk, the park, and the pub are physical spaces for chance encounters of friends and strangers, is replaced with the simulacrum of sociality given by the televisual gaze into the lives of others, with personal privacy mediated as bodies are shunted from home to car to work and back again. The car becomes necessary for the enclosure and impoverishment of social life, for the loss of public interaction in favor of, at best, scopophilic, spectacular intimacy granted only through visual media. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 189

With the loss of the city, the car became the primary means to experience space. The experience of “mobile privatization”—the phrase Raymond Williams coined to describe the intertwined reinvention of urban space and the rise of televisual spectacle30—shows us how the car is necessarily conjoined with a complete reframing of public and private life. The public life of urban space, in which the street, the sidewalk, the park, and the pub are physical spaces for chance encounters of friends and strangers, is replaced with the simulacrum of sociality given by the televisual gaze into the lives of others, with personal privacy mediated as bodies are shunted from home to car to work and back again. The car becomes necessary for the enclosure and impoverishment of social life, for the loss of public interaction in favor of, at best, scopophilic, spectacular intimacy granted only through visual media. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 189

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Raymond Williams’s ‘mobile privatization’ — the car turning public sociality into private televisual spectacle — a causal mechanism for how the geography of the Corpocene works.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s overarching Corpocene thesis about infrastructures enclosing the individual; also resonates with The Frankfurt School material on how technologies restructure sociality and with Communication as Culture media theory
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory: A Marxist…, 189