Week 9: If I could study anything...

This is going to sound incredibly boring to most people, but I've always been curious about traffic signs and traffic lights. So if I were to study a single object, and have all the resources in the world available to me, this would be it.

Image from Wikipedia: h
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light

The history of the evolution of signs and lights is well known, down to the fact that the first stop sign was white, and the first traffic light ever installed exploded and killed the policeman operating it. But somehow, in the hundred and fifty-odd years since, both traffic signs and lights have become incredibly standardized. I've travelled quite a lot, and I always find it fascinating that even in countries with entirely different languages and cultures, I always know when to cross the street and when to stop. This standardization holds true even in countries that are not bound by international conventions. 

The questions, then, is what might be revealed by a more in-depth study of traffic signs and lights as cultural artifacts. Is there some specific quality that attracts us to the colours red, green and yellow? Are these cross-cultural indicators, or are they more holdovers from a time when much of the world was still under the sway of colonialism? If they're holdovers, how do countries who were never under European control fit in? And why didn't those countries who were under colonial rule choose to switch things up and apply a system that made more sense to them? Like Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol's Zimbabwe Bush Pump, then, is there a certain degree of flexibility or fluidity in the basic concept that allowed it to gain such a hold on a world where tourists weren't always a consideration?

I know it's not the most exciting object... but I really do want to know!

Sources:

De Laet, Marianne and Annamarie Mol. The Zimbabwe Bush Pump: Mechanics of a Fluid Technology. Social Studies of Science 30, no 2(2000): 225-263.