Doctoral Dissertation Research in the History of Technology

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This project looks at the relationship between technology and its social and cultural context by examining the ways in which changing ideas and attitudes about camp vehicles and leisure camping shaped recreational vehicle technology. Little is known about the ways in which American society framed its technologies to respond to the cultural craze with recreational camping. Preliminary research indicates that the earliest forms of recreational vehicle technologies in the United States evolved as an expression of the social needs and cultural desires of upper class individuals.. But this changed as middle class consumers used a variety of recreational vehicles to fulfill their autocamping needs. Using the history and evolution of recreational vehicles as a case example, the project tests as well as illustrates a dynamic model of the relationship between technological change and social values which argues that technological change occurs in response to specific sets of social and cultural values, rather than serving as a catalyst of social changes in the face of which people have little or no control. The question shifts from wondering when a moment in technological evolution occurred, to asking, first, what social values and ideas prompted the selection of a technology, and second, what new values and ideas may have then prompted the shift from one technology to another. In the specific case of American camp vehicle technology, the changing ideas that may have prompted the replacement of auto-tents, camp-trailers and auto-conversions of earlier use with those technologies primarily in use after 1930, are ones subsumed under the phrase `recreational vehicles.` Indeed, the ideas about what constituted a recreational vehicle changed dramatically after 1930, bringing with them an equally dramatic rearrangement first in the relationship between individual uses and the larger social and cultural context in which they were used, and, second, in the everyday recreational vehicle technologies.