Getting where?
The New Yorker: Annals of the Road: Getting There
Nick Paumgarten takes a brilliant look at the difference between “being told where you are and knowing where you are”.
The connection between representation and performativity in mapping has never been clear. From early photographic road-guides and “live-maps” to GPS technologies and Google Earth, orientation and navigation have always relied heavily on actual on-the-ground experience. For example, before road signage was common, early maps simply told the driver where to turn. In many ways these maps sought to extend or replicate the ease of travel associated with taking the train: to simply arrive at one’s destination. Later on, after state highways were systematised and regulated, map makers realised “it would do no one any good to have a map in his lap if there were no signs on the road telling him where on that map he might be.” So the emergence of “official” state highway maps tied together governments (municipal, state and federal), industries (oil and gas, automobiles, construction) and drivers (citizens, consumers) in mutually constitutive ways. Within these broader connections, there was also a shift from mapping only discrete routes or itineraries, to also mapping multiple possible routes:
“You see not just the single route but the layout of all the routes within the area, with some differentiation in quality. And it is up to the traveller to make choices about which route to take…It’s broadly associated with greater freedom of movement.”
But this doesn’t mean that road maps are all-inclusive or even totalising. For example, today’s cartographers mostly neglect to include in their maps all our “unofficial geometries” - markers and paths made or recognised by private enterprise instead of “official” grids and signage. And we’d all probably agree that neither MapQuest nor OnStar can prepare a driver for the idiosyncracies of a particular road, at a particular time of day, with a particular combination of other drivers. After all, it’s these kinds of factors that can make an efficient or accurate route seem like an excursion through hell. But road-map makers know all of this. That’s why there are people whose job it is to always be-on-the-road, recording the constant physical and cultural changes to routes and updating all the “official” maps. They are masters of orientation and navigation in this world of mobility.
This matter of mastery also strikes me as at the heart of most location-based technologies and locative media. In places where maps are not in the public domain, the value of making one’s own maps cannot be understated, nor ignored as a mechanism for (self-defined?) order and control. And even where “official” maps are freely accessible, there is still great value and interest in “unofficial” or idiosyncratic maps. There’s also still value and interest in maps themselves, not just the information they provide:
“Along the continuum of modern geography scholarship, [Kenneth] Nebenzahl is a little old-fashioned … He views the rise of digital mapping with a mixture of incomprehension, condescension, and sorrow …’Geographers now hate maps,’ Nebenzahl said. ‘If you only give people a six-by-six-inch screen, how can they get a sense of where they are, or where they fit in? We’re pushing the next generation into geographic illiteracy by not giving them a sense of what world geography is.’”
It’s easy to see how maps are used to orient ourselves physically, but this matter of orientation is also crucial in social and cultural terms. It’s hard to feel connected to, let alone responsible or accountable to, people and places not on our everyday maps. As they say, “out of sight, out of mind.”
Update 11 May 2006
MIT Technology Review: Real-Time Maps Could Help Make Cities More Livable
“There are a number of possible applications. The most immediate is, if you’re able to monitor all the flows in the city, you can understand better the use of space. You can understand better new types of space use that are emerging because of technology … Is it a dream scenario or a nightmare scenario, being able to monitor all this activity? For a traffic engineer this is a dream scenario. If you are somebody interested in architecture, this is a dream scenario. If you are somebody interested in emergency relief, this is a dream scenario … If you think about privacy this would be a nightmare.”
(via)
May 12th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
“‘If you only give people a six-by-six-inch screen, how can they get a sense of where they are, or where they fit in? We’re pushing the next generation into geographic illiteracy by not giving them a sense of what world geography is.’”
I think something like google earth is quite the opposite of that. When you can zoom it to a city block and out to the entire globe or fly from one place to another a six-by-six-inch screen doesn’t seem so little.