Bumper stickers, road rage & digital messaging

If you tend to shy away from cars covered in bumper stickers, you now have good reason. New research has unearthed an interesting correlation between drivers who personalize their cars with bumper stickers and personal markers of private territory, and those prone to road rage. Now the bumper sticker is being taken to new levels with personalized electronic messages able to be displayed at will – such as the highly inflammatory gesture pictured. Is this a positive thing? Will our roads be enhanced by our newfound ability to communicate our feelings more effectively to other road users?

Firstly, let’s look at bumper stickers. From wikipedia: Considerable variation exists around the world as to the context and purpose of stickers. On some vehicles, some stickers are like trophy signs of WWII aeroplanes, either of locations visited or actions completed. They have also been extensively applied to rear windows as well, where legislative measures have not banned such use. For instance in Sweden that is the normal place to put them and the bumper sticker is actually called "bakrutedekal" (rear window decal). More recently, bumper stickers have become a route for advertising and a few companies offer to match car owners to advertisers willing to pay for the ad.

In Israel, one of the most popular songs of all time is Shirat Hasticker ("The Sticker Song") by Hadag Nachash, a song composed entirely of bumper sticker slogans. Variants of the bumper sticker have developed in recent years, including vinyl decals meant to be applied to a car's rear windshield, and chrome emblems to be affixed to the body of the car itself, generally on the rear (the "Jesus fish" is a popular example of this).

Bumper stickers and other forms of vehicle customization are designed to provide messages about the driver to other road users – his or her preferences, identity, and personal brand.

People seemingly love to customize, but apparently, at least according to the research from Colorado State University, the high level of personalization that has fueled the automotive aftermarket to such immense proportions is largely designed to signify the driver’s personal territory. A highly personalized automobile is clearly owned by the driver, the driver’s beliefs are law in their domain and the car is their personal territory.

Even more fascinating was the news that the predictor of road rage was simply the number of bumper stickers, not their content – that is, promoting peace and love was just as much a predictor of road rage as promoting less restrictive gun laws. It seems highly territorial people are those most likely to be involved in a road rage incident and when they do so, they are tapping into fairly primal response mechanisms when they find themselves simultaneously in private territory (their car) and a public space. They are forgetting that the public road is not theirs, and are exhibiting aggressive territorial behavior that normally would only be (even remotely) acceptable in defending their personal territory.

The more markers a car has, the more aggressively the person tends to drive when provoked.

With two companies entering the market in the last twelve months with what are essentially one-way electronic messaging systems for cars, this modern day manifestation of the 70-year old bumper sticker appears set to cause some consternation on public roads.

In the US, Korea, Japan, Scandinavia and other technologically-advanced countries we are witnessing the evolution of personal communications into a host of different form factors, while in less technologically-advanced nations, the mobile phone is selling by the hundreds of millions. People across the world who have never had telephone landlines, are buying their first mobile phone this year – a billion mobile phones will be sold in 2008 and half the world’s 6.7 billion people already have them. The world is currently undergoing immense technological upheaval, massive shifts in information access and we suspect, some new and sociologically-challenging uses of technology will evolve. This is one such questionable use of technology.

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