Dr. Clifford Nass is seen at the wheel of an automobile simulator in the Communications at the Humans and Interactive Media Lab at Stanford. He is the Director of the Revs Program at Stanford.
Lynch explains goals of the Collier Collection and the new Revs Institute at Stanford
By Michael T. Lynch
As an enthusiast, I’ve often wondered over the years where the automobile went wrong with Academia. Although the automobile has had a huge impact on many intellectual disciplines, little scholarly work has been written about it that wasn’t negative. Certainly cars have had deleterious effects on society – pollution, urban sprawl and fatal accidents among them — there have been positive aspects as well. When I left the Midwest to go to school in the Northeast, it occurred to me that in centers of intellectual inquiry like New York, Boston, New Haven and Philadelphia, these cities all had working mass transportation systems. Many people didn’t even own cars, simply renting them for occasional weekend excursions. Intellectuals operating in these public transportation hothouses could only see the evil in the automobile, not considering what a miniscule portion of our population is served by even minimally-effective public transportation. Certainly the automobile is positive in that a huge percentage of American workers could not get to their jobs without one and would have no ability to start a new job, if they lost one.
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