Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.
Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.
Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.
Although laws governing moving-traffic violations are fairly uniform throughout the United States, the effective levels of enforcement of these laws vary dramatically from city to city. Basing this study on statistics from nearly seven hundred police departments, census data, personal interviews, on-the-spot observation, and detailed case studies of four Massachusetts cities--Lynn, Waltham, Malden, and Cambridge--Mr. Gardiner identifies and discusses the factors that determine police decisionmaking in relation to traffic violations.
After a brief description of the role of various state and local agencies in settling traffic-enforcement policy, the author analyzes in depth the traffic activities of the four Massachusetts cities. He examines in particular the extent of public pressure in seeking modification of enforcement standards, intradepartmental practices, or "norms," and the role of traffic enforcement in the total spectrum of police activities.
Following the case studies, the author discusses the variations among the traffic policies of municipal police departments, and questions the "public pressure" interpretation of police policies. Mr. Gardiner finds that, although citizens and city officials frequently seek to influence individual decisions, they seldom know how strict or lenient their department's general policies are, and seldom care. In addition, the author finds no significant connection between the severity of ticketing policies and such factors as income, race, or education, but does find some correlation with the geographical stability of a city's population.
Finally, the author concludes that the chief source of departmental traffic policy is an internally established set of norms concerning the importance of traffic work and the frequency with which officers should write tickets. Evidence from cities that change their traffic policies indicates that individual preferences on the part of chiefs or ranking officers are the primary source of these norms.
This book is an important contribution to the growing area in social sciences that deals with law enforcement and, more broadly, local political systems.
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