Post #9-Americans are addicted to driving…..at least in Suburbia(Figure)
Posted on: June 4, 2011
Cultural myths were developed based upon the events that are occurring in a society’s culture. Roland Barthes, according to the text, talks about how they came to be via the bourgeois society and how they utilized myths as a means of asserting their values. One might ask then, why did these myths become so common place? Who allowed these myths to be upheld to this day? Well, society has a lot to do with how popular, “truthful” and the duration of these myths. We, as members of the society, are capable of controlling what becomes a myth and what is “truth”. One cultural myth that is quite common in the American Suburbia is “American are addicted to driving”. I can agree that this myth may only seem plausible in Suburbia because not all Americans like to drive, whether it is in their daily commute or just travelling to various places. Members of Suburbia are seen by the rest of society as being “car happy” because of the hustle and bustle of their daily schedules. In all actuality, Americans aren’t addicted to their cars; it’s merely a tool for getting tasks completed at a faster rate. If you look at any city, you can see that cars are the dominant mode of transportation. Living in Suburbia doesn’t necessarily mean that you like driving your automobile more that the next person. It’s just out of convenience.
The function of this myth is to placed or rather, categorize citizens living in Suburbia as “car happy”, associating that signifier with its signified as the population of people who own multiple cars as being addicted to them. The same concept can be traced back to how the bourgeois utilized myth. The signifier being car relates to a specific signified: Suburbia is “car happy”. However the bourgeois would make the connection to a new signified of being wealthy or in a negative sense, cars being an addiction. This idea then, becomes naturalized and is viewed as being the truth. This is how myths have been upheld for such a long time.
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