{"id":1665,"date":"2009-06-07T14:40:07","date_gmt":"2009-06-07T21:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/06\/the-death-of-thumbing-it\/"},"modified":"2009-06-07T14:40:07","modified_gmt":"2009-06-07T21:40:07","slug":"the-death-of-thumbing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/06\/07\/the-death-of-thumbing-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death Of Thumbing It"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Guardian<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

A guide to hitchhiking’s decline<\/h1>\n

It’s not driver selfishness that’s done for thumbing a lift but technological and economic change<\/span><\/p>\n

Joe Moran<\/a>, Friday 5 June 2009 23.30 BS<\/p>\n

The decline of hitching is a lesson in how significant historical changes happen invisibly. I own a secondhand copy of the Hitch-hiker’s Manual: Britain, published in 1979 by a young travel journalist, Simon Calder. This uninviting-looking book, with its grainy pages and ugly typeface, conjures up an exotic roadside world that is now vanished.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It provides a record of the rich hitchhiking subculture that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s: the long line of hitchers at hotspots like Staples Corner at the foot of the M1, with their own imperfectly executed queueing etiquette; the attention-grabbing gimmicks used by the more enterprising hitchers, such as wearing ties, dinner suits and even gorilla costumes; and the dirty tricks employed by the unscrupulous, like leaning on crutches or wearing soldiers’ uniforms to encourage drivers to stop.<\/p>\n

Why is this tribe of people virtually extinct? Drivers did not suddenly become less altruistic and, while risk is often cited as a factor, the number of machete-wielding psychopaths on the roads has presumably remained stable.<\/p>\n

There are two schools of thought about the decline of hitching….\u00a0The second school of thought focuses on a more nebulous cultural shift. Hitching began its long decline at the end of the 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher came to power. Is it possible that, in a less equal society that is more sceptical about the value of public goods, there has been a gradual waning of the civic-minded impulse? Certainly the Thatcher years saw a general reaction against anyone perceived as a hippyish freeloader, epitomised by the attitudes towards new age travellers at Stonehenge. In a society where everything has a price, it becomes harder to sustain what the social policy expert Richard Titmuss called the gift relationship: the kinds of exchanges based on trust and goodwill that bring intangible benefits to everyone but are the hardest to retrieve when they are gone. Just as you need a well-populated tribe of hitchers to create the perception that it is a respectable activity, so any gift economy needs a self-sustaining momentum for it to work.<\/p>\n

[ click to read full article at The Guardian<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Guardian A guide to hitchhiking’s decline It’s not driver selfishness that’s done for thumbing a lift but technological and economic change Joe Moran, Friday 5 June 2009 23.30 BS The decline of hitching is a lesson in how significant historical changes happen invisibly. I own a secondhand copy of the Hitch-hiker’s Manual: Britain, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}