| While celebrating individual freedom, the automobile is also a mass-produced commodity embedded within economies of scale and industrial practices. To purchase an automobile as 'unique' as its owner, an automobile which celebrates the autonomy of this particular individual purchaser, therefore becomes problematic. Car modifications are an attempt to resolve this contradiction. Car modification, therefore, is a form of meaning making that takes a characteristic artefact of industrial civilization---the automobile---and re-shapes it into an expression of cultural worldviews neither intended nor foreseeable by industrial origins. This thesis examines the history of car modification from its inception to the present. More specifically it augments that history by contributing an analysis of the least studied period of car modification which occurs between 1975 & the present. |
