Doctoral Dissertation Research in the History of Technology

该项目通过考察露营车和休闲露营的观念和态度的变化对休闲车技术的影响，来研究技术与其社会文化背景之间的关系。人们对美国社会如何构建其技术来应对休闲露营的文化热潮知之甚少。初步研究表明，美国最早的休闲车技术形式是作为上层社会个人的社会需求和文化欲望的一种表达而发展起来的。但随着中产阶级消费者使用各种休闲车来满足他们的汽车露营需求，这种情况发生了变化。以休闲车的历史和演变为例，该项目测试并说明了技术变革与社会价值观之间关系的动态模型，该模型认为，技术变革是对特定的社会和文化价值观的反应，而不是在人们很少或根本无法控制的情况下作为社会变革的催化剂。问题从想知道技术进化的某个时刻是什么时候发生的，转变为问，首先，什么样的社会价值观和思想促使了一种技术的选择，其次，什么样的新价值观和思想可能促使了从一种技术向另一种技术的转变。在美国露营车技术的具体案例中，观念的变化可能促使人们用1930年以后主要使用的技术取代早期使用的汽车帐篷、露营拖车和自动改装车，这些技术被归为“休闲车”一词。“事实上，1930年后，关于什么是休闲车的概念发生了巨大的变化，带来了同样戏剧性的重新安排，首先是个人用途与使用它们的更大的社会和文化背景之间的关系，其次是日常休闲车技术。

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.