Candy Paint

Indispensible aspects of our society, cars have become a very useful way of expressing oneself to others. Whether one is buying to show off status or to accommodate for an increasingly larger family size, our society transposes certain stereotypes from vehicles onto the people that drive them. Many of these stereotypes are obvious to the general public, like a middle-aged woman driving a mini-van who is known as the “soccer mom”, or a vehicle with tinted windows and large rims being identified as a youth likely in their late teens or early twenties.

What is interesting about vehicles is that they are everywhere in our society and this causes some to become immune to the fact that they act as a medium. Additionally, the greater the knowledge that one has of vehicles, the greater the ability he/she has to further stereotype drivers by the vehicle they are operating. Croteau and Hoynes explain this idea when they write “Understanding or ‘decoding’ these messages requires knowledge of the conventions of the medium and the workings of the culture” (275). Thus, if one knows specific types of exhaust and stereo systems, he/she can further dissect who may be driving a vehicle by what the actual vehicle entails. Vehicles, therefore, present a medium where multiple mediums inside the whole can determine the interpreted meaning by the audience. With innumerable variations at one’s disposal, vehicles are an extremely unique medium in our society.

Take a look at a Honda commercial that displays people's faces as cars