Authors:
Jonathan Bean
I recently took a road trip from Tucson, Arizona, to Portland, Oregon, to spend time with family and to spare our spoiled dog the indignity of flying in the cargo hold. I ended up driving an old car on the trip, a 2004 Volkswagen Passat, and the experience had me reflecting on the speed of innovation and the ubiquity of computing in seemingly every corner of life. Road trips have a special place in American popular culture; it's an entire movie genre, usually culminating in some kind of life-changing experience. And while I didn't follow exactly the same path as Thelma and Louise did in the classic 1990s road trip movie, I found myself struck by the degree to which today's technology allows us to not plan ahead.
This particular trip had an additional time warp effect, because the Passat is essentially the same car I drove when I was in my early 20s, right down to the manual transmission. Road trips required more planning then, because it was the dawn of the cellphone era, and GPS navigation systems were, at that time, only available in luxury cars or pricey stand-alone systems suction-cupped to the windshield. Standard protocol was a glove box full of maps, and, if you were really cutting edge (I was!), a couple of printouts from MapBlast, which created what the service termed LineDrive directions. These were simple, graphic depictions that showed not only direction but also duration, so it was simple to see at a glance that you'd be on the interstate highway for a good five hours [1,2].
The real planning, however, revolved around music. Before iPhones, before iPods—even before MP3s—music came on CDs, which fortunately I don't need to explain to younger readers, because they are experiencing something of a retro resurgence, with sales up for the first time since 2004. That was the year my new old car was first sold, presumably to an audiophile, since it had an upgraded sound system with a subwoofer, CD player, CD changer input, and a cassette tape player, which enabled me to play the one mixtape, from a high school friend, that I'd allowed myself to save. This is all to say that back in the day it took a good couple of hours before a trip to decide upon the soundscape that would accompany the journey.
And here's the part of the trip where the switchbacks begin. First, a lurch from nostalgia to theory. Everyone's now aware of how today's technology has a vise grip on our emotions, usually for the worse. Conventional wisdom and psychological research links the rise of cellphones to an increase in anxiety, depression, and loneliness—the blips and pings and swipes driving us to endlessly compare ourselves to others [3,4]. And while this makes intuitive sense to me—my own life has been immeasurably calmer simply by turning notifications off on my phone—I don't think it's the whole story.
For this trip, I considered excavating my CD collection from the back of the closet, but I soon found myself confronted with the disorder from a previous effort to digitize it. At one point I'd taken all the CDs out of their jewel box containers, alphabetized them by artist, and transferred them into sleeves that slotted into filing cabinet–style plastic boxes. But at some other point, I'd removed the CDs in the course of transferring the audio files to a digital storage, leaving hundreds of bare discs piled in a cardboard box. I used an old computer with a CD drive, but the nostalgia of clicking the CD into the drive and hearing it whir away wore off after importing the first few discs. It quickly became an endless, dull, and distracting task. I shoved the lot back into the closet after realizing that it would be far easier to rip audio files from the few hard-to-find B-sides and singles in my collection, and then subscribe to a streaming service, which I've paid for ever since.
Two days and $75 later, a Bluetooth adapter arrived on my front porch. In less than five minutes, I had plugged it into the CD changer input on the car stereo and wirelessly connected my phone. Compared to my road trip a quarter century earlier, ordering and installing the thing took less time than what I would have spent finding the CDs I wanted to listen to. And this is a tiny reflection of the monumental shifts in technology that I largely take for granted. But during my trip, it also caused me to reflect on how it changed the way I listened to music and how I felt. I remember sorting through my CD collection for a four-day drive between Chicago and California, moving CDs from the jewel boxes into padded vinyl CD wallets, zipping them up, and arranging them neatly on the passenger-side floor, just within reach. At that time, I was still in college and wondering what would become of my life. Music was part of the journey, not a simple salve for boredom. The way CD players worked was an important part of the experience: Mostly you put on an album and listened to the whole thing start to finish. Vinyl records, of course, always worked this way. The experience of narrative and emotional structure both drove the resurgence of vinyl and has echoes in the recent resurgence of CDs [5].
But on this trip, I didn't consider in advance the experience I wanted to have. Instead, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, backed by the knowledge that there was an almost infinite well of choice. Portuguese fado? How about contemporary Brazilian electronic dance music? When drums became too enervating, it was time to stream radio station Chill. I remembered a magic moment from that long Chicago-to-California trip when a track from one of my favorite albums came on as though by kismet, while I was driving through a beautiful canyon at sunset. I used the voice assistant to command my phone to blast the same song. It didn't have the same effect on a particularly bleak stretch of the I-5 superhighway in central California. One way of understanding this is as a classic case of the negative effect of having too many choices. But I think there's another way of thinking, which surfaces a fundamental shift in the way we feel, not about, but rather with and because of, technology.
To do that, let's downshift to get some traction before entering the next switchback, taking us into the terrain of philosophy. Ted Schatzki's concept of teleoaffective structures focuses on the relationship between goals and the emotional states that we attach to them [6]. Feeling motivated to work out because it makes you feel good? That's a teleoaffective structure at work. The concept adds some nuance to the psychological perspective, because it highlights the role of culture in shaping both broader networks of teleoaffective structures and our own experience of them. There's a lot at play in how anyone feels about going to the gym, shaped by advertising, personal history, fitness levels, and other factors. Going back to the link between cellphones and anxiety, the concept of teleoaffective structures adds some depth and perspective. It's not a chicken-and-egg problem but rather one expression of a complex reconfiguration of many relationships, each one increasing the strength of the vector outcome.
Compared to the car I have become accustomed to driving, a late-model electric vehicle with a host of safety and assistance technologies, driving the 2004 car was a wholly different experience. It took only one stall to reinstate muscle memory for the clutch (yes, it must go down every time the car approaches a stop!). I had to continually remind myself that there were no lights on the mirrors that would illuminate when changing lanes, no beep or automatically applied brakes when backing up while parking, not to mention a camera to see what's immediately behind the car. In particular, the existence of cruise control without any kind of radar or other collision sensor seems equal parts preposterous and reckless. Can you imagine the reaction today if a car manufacturer introduced a new feature that would allow a car to pilot itself into anything ahead of it at highway speeds?
Am I a safer driver in the old car or the new one? I'm not sure, but my sensorium is oriented rather differently when driving them. The old car demands my attention, making me more aware of the road and the risks of driving. There's a pleasure in feeling fully present in a demanding activity like driving when technology—whether it's the clutch, the CD player, the suspension—keeps you engaged. In the new car, comfort comes from knowing that systems are working to prevent disaster. While that might not directly increase the potential for distraction, it does shift the focus of attention, just as thinking about what music to stream next is different from anticipating the next song on an album. This subtle change in the teleoaffective structure of driving mirrors broader trends where decision making is increasingly outsourced to technological systems, distancing us from the immediate, visceral experience of being in control. Always-on technology seems designed to make us spend less time thinking about how we want to feel in the future, and that's taking away from the experience of the present. To put it another way, it feels like technology is taking on the role of an overprotective nanny. When everything is done for us, we not only lose the sense of what it takes to get the job done but also the pleasure of planning ahead. Expectation and anticipation should not be thought of as extraneous, expendable, or superfluous aspects of our interactions with technology, but rather valuable opportunities to decide about where we want to focus our attention—and how we want to feel about our experiences.
References
1. Agrawala, M. and Stolte, C. Rendering effective route maps: Improving usability through generalization. Proc. of the 28th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. ACM, 2001, 241–49.
2. Huffman, D. Remembering LineDrive. somethingaboutmaps. Mar. 8, 2011; https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remembering-linedrive/
3. Haidt, J. Get phones out of schools now. The Atlantic. Jun. 6, 2023; https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/ban-smartphones-phone-free-schools-social-media/674304/
4. Twenge, J.M., Haidt, J., Blake, A.B., McAllister, C., Lemon, H., and Le Roy, A. Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness. Journal of Adolescence 93 (2021), 257–69.
5. Magaudda, P. When materiality "bites back": Digital music consumption practices in the age of dematerialization. Journal of Consumer Culture 11, 1 (2011), 15–36.
6. Schatzki, T.R. The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.
Author
Jonathan Bean is director of the Institute for Energy Solutions and an associate professor at the University of Arizona. He studies taste, technology, and market transformation. [email protected]
Copyright 2025 held by owner/author
The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2025 ACM, Inc.
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