Continuing along the thread of music and the experience of systems and of movement, here is a post that appeared on my other blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, on November 11, 2011. In it, I draw from half-remembered conversations from grad school to inform an elucidation of the fluidity of movement and the transparency of technical artifacts when we are using them.

(This post was followed, a few days later, by a more technical post based on an attempt to read Husserl.)

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A Phenomenology of Driving, and Other Matters

Yesterday morning, I was discussing risk and risk perception with my engineering ethics class, focusing on the distinction between the risk expert’s quantitative approach to risk (risk = probability of harm x magnitude of harm) with the lay public’s qualitative and experiential approach to risk.

There are a number of reasons, I noted, why Americans regularly accept the relatively high risk of injury or death from automobile accidents (with ~40,000 car-related deaths in the United States every year), but are skittish about flying in airplanes and exposure to other risks that are, statistically, of much lower probability.

People are generally more likely to accept risks they take on voluntarily, for example, than risks that are imposed without their consent. People are also more likely to accept familiar risks than those that are novel. They may also, I speculated, be more willing to accept risks when they have a sense of being in control of their own fate. In fact, when we are in a familiar circumstance with a sense of being in control, we may not even perceive a given activity as risky at all.

There is little in American experience more familiar than driving and riding in automobiles, and we seldom feel more in control of our own fates than when we are behind the wheel. Continue reading “From the Archive: A Phenomenology of Driving, and Other Matters” →