If there is one thing history teaches us, it is that people love yelling their opinions at strangers. If there are two things history teaches us, then we’d also learn that the bumper sticker was created in 1946 by Forest Gill in Kansas City, MO. Add traffic lights to the mix and we have the world’s first social media platform.
To many, personal identity is less important than displaying an internet identity. Similar to wearing a mask. We seek to buy our desired identity from commercial for-profit companies. We do this in many forms such as t-shirts, hats, online filters and most importantly, we seek to put our identity on the back of our automobiles. While idling at red lights the strangers behind us are a trapped audience that now knows the number of people in our family, what mountains we’ve climbed, political affiliation, quirky one-liners that others wrote so we can prove we’re witty and so many other things they don’t need to know.
The man who invented the baby on board bumper sticker had no children. Which seems thematically fitting.
TV commercials first aired in 1941 and yet the 1952 presidential election favored bumper stickers. Which is why to this day, we know “We Like Ike.”
Modern day social media has adopted this yelling-at-strangers-to-express-unnecessary-opinions business model. Now we put metaphorical bumper stickers on books covering our face, on birds and on instantaneous grandmothers, to name a few internet platforms. Every status you post online, every picture, every meme, every synthesized one-liner that proves your point in complicated issues are all the bumper stickers of the internet. Here at I Hope This is News we are very proud of our bumper stickers.
In 2008, Colorado University performed a study. The results were, if you had a bumper sticker, whether it was a peaceful or hostile message, you tended to be a more aggressive driver.
This study makes the Coexist bumper stickers very concerning. Do the Coexist people really want an all-out death match similar to The Purge movies?
At aggressively long red lights we are occasionally given the privilege of being behind a car covered in bumper stickers like remora fish on a shark. These people in fact cannot settle on an opinion but prefer tell us a whole story. The favorite of which is that they have four children and yet only one, “my child is an honors student” sticker. Which raises the question, what are your other three hooligans up to?
Considering the exponential proliferation of internet bumper stickers, are we all hooligans now?