Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - Sándor Végh: Adoption or Adaptation?: Interpretations of the Automobile

It follows from the thesis that certain changes had to be implemented in society prior to the wide

—range sale of the automobile. In my opinion, this preparation for mass distribution happened during the automobile's "plaything of the rich" period and included manipulation of the masses through advertisement emphasizing the car's advantages, such as mobility, equality, and individuality. These appeals will be examined in the paper. But why the great need for the automobile? The answer is not at all simple, as one would think at the first glance. "Our need for cars is a 'false' need created through the manipulation of consumer desire," says Interrante (90). In his essay, he also states that the car did satisfy a real need for transportation, but argues that this need has changed as the social and spatial patterns of American culture have changed. People use their cars far more often than it would be necessary. If they can afford to do so, they buy better-looking, faster, more powerful, and more expensive cars than they really need. To be able to provide a complete answer to the question one has to go beyond the concept of the car as merely a means of transportation. For the automobile may also serve as an exemplary object in examining the structure and operation of a consumer society in its adolescent period as well as an exciting piece of consumer article which came to mean much more through its mutually influential relationship with society. Therefore, it might help understand the automobile's integration into American culture if one looks at the automobile not only as a means of transportation, or a consumer item, or even as a fashionable contemporary obsession, but as a unique and cohesive mixture, an incarnation of the American dream, the manifestation of America itself. The automobile's way into American society To fully comprehend how Americans relate to revolutionary technical inventions, one has to observe the car as a concrete manifestation of an abstract idea of technical evolution in the American environment. From the very beginning America was struggling to develop self-consciously and rapidly to make up for the few hundred years it skipped in history. It was a new nation that had to prove its right to exist and its power to survive, advance, and 76