REBALANCE D3.4 - The role of communication in shaping the European mobility culture
Creators: name: Cassolà, Daniel
name: Gaggi, Silvia
name: Ricci, Andrea
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021

description: REBALANCE aims at describing the narrative and the essences that shape the mobility culture of today. This report will help visualize the influence, over time, ofcommunication on the European mobility culture and how the media have conveyed and represented mobility concepts. Cultural changes can be analysed, among other things, through the evolution of the mainstream language used by media and the way values are channelled to citizens: advertisements, movies, press articles, artistic production, video games, social media, etc. Word- and image-search is performed to this end on a significant sample of popular communication, spanning several decades, in order to unveil signals and messages reflecting the evolution of the mainstream mobility culture and to identify dominant representations of explicit or underlying values and their dynamics over time.Cultural practices both reflect and define group identities, whether the group is a smallsubculture or a nation. Thus, the cultural field is the place for creativity and meaning making. But it is also a battlefield: who controls the media and popular culture, and what messages they communicate, are central to how social life is organized and how power operates. The media are arguably the most important form of cultural production in our society. Digital technologies are creating new ways of participating in the media that are changing the very foundations of cultural production and consumption.This report follows a unifying trend that relates the developments in mobility and communication throughout history. We start our journey with the invention of thewheel to reach, after thousands of years, the first relevant milestone in the 19th century with the beginning of the railway. Not coincidentally, the telegraph followed a parallel path and started the era of mass communication. We do not have to wait so long to witness the appearance of the most widely used means of transport in the world and arguably the most referred mobility token in communication: the car. Some years later, radio collapsed space and enabled instantaneous mass communication. The dynamic between society and mass media that is so prevalent today started to develop. Brand advertising became fuel for the mass media, which turned into huge machineries of cultural production. Car marketing found the perfect loudspeaker and publicity became bright and impressionistic depicting idealized scenes directed to the wealthy classes. Before World War II, air travel was rare but the people and the press was nonetheless fascinated by it. The start of modernity was characterised by the democratisation of means of transport, mostly through the proliferation of the automobile, that became a status symbol as well. Popular culture was boosted thanks to television and its appeal to the masses, the ‘culture industry’ begun to dominate the cultural scene. A ‘mass society’ began to share mass pleasures, like cheap mass travel and tourism. Homogeneity in society was accelerated by the cinema, radio, and television, offering attractive role models from America to European citizens. The ideas of independence and freedom gained ground in the public mind and placidly survivedthe effects of 1960s counterculture. In the 1980s, neoliberalism reordered social reality and our status as individuals. In media, corporate takeovers and mergers werethe common rule. Hollywood imposed its style of movies to almost every national cinema in the world. In recent decades, the dominant trend goes from values ofdocility and obedience to values of self-determination and equality. The end of the Cold War produces the crystallization of a new global paradigm, whose maximum social, political and economic exponent is globalization. Postmodernity is a time of disenchantment and a bet on individual progress. The mass media become transmitters of the truth. The individualistic turn at the end of the past century and the values associated with it (freedom, exciting life, pleasure, ambition, social power, wealth, authority) have been well accompanied by the media.Today, technology and digitalisation are starting to exert great influence on mobility and subsequently new hot topics and innovations arise and connect with mobility issues: gender, inequalities, status symbol, active mobility, sharing or privacy.When we wonder about the future, we see now that younger generations are slowly shifting away from the overemphasis of the speed and comfort optimization for traffic and show a growing environmental and health consciousness, intensive use of digital technologies and a tendency towards sharing instead of owning. Will they initiate the cultural shift that will allow us to reach a sustainable mobility culture?