Saturday, October 23, 2010
Place & space
I was just looking up an address on my iPhone, and glancing at the Google map, and I suddenly wondered: are digital humans in fact more geographically inclined or savvy than any humans before? I know we talk about computers keeping people from connecting with woods and so on, but by the way that digital humans can read maps so quickly, are we in a funny way more than ever tuned into actual, physical space? What does it mean that we can map space so (seemingly) effortlessly? Does the ability to navigate a Google map mean that we know the space that our bodies then move through? These are roughly hewn questions; help me out with this.
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I would say we have no idea about physical space. GPS adds an additional intermediary between ourself and the physical space we inhabit. I recently got a smart-dumb phone with GPS. For kicks I asked it to tell me how to get to Loyola. Its directions are not as good as the ones that I know. Relying on GPS limits our ability to become familiar with an area. To discover how an area is laid out, I think we need to become lost in that area and then create the connections between locations ourselves. Now, GPS may help us get to an unknown known location, but it will not help us get to know the area. (Maybe.)
ReplyDeleteI feel that we are actually vastly out of touch with physical space and orientation and on the other hand have become highly skilled at orienting ourselves in a digital landscape. We have become so fully reliant on having our paths mapped from point A to point B that there are many people today who are incapable of traveling, and I mean that in its most basic idea of simply going from one place to another, without a digital navigator. Think of the news stories of women driving into lakes because that is what their Gps has told them or a recent article on a Swedish couple who upon misspelling the name of the beautiful southern island of Capri in Italy instead drove 400 miles the wrong way to the industrial northern town of Carpi. It has come to the point now where some people cannot walk through a city, even their own city, without Google walking directions. How do we now have so much faith in technology as to follow it even when common sense and real world experience indicate that it is wrong?
ReplyDeleteI agree, anyone who regularly uses their gps system seems way less in tune with their surroundings and they get lost (I find) more than those who rarely ever or never use such maps. For example, many directions we use instinctually are foregone in a gps system. They don't take into account the condition of the roads suggested, whether or not it passes by a "bad" neighborhood, how weather may affect the suggested route, or how long it will really take to get there considering traffic habits and time of day. Driving in New Orleans, you face one or more of these problems every single time you get on the road... Someone who doesn't drive here regularly or someone who has to get directions from every point a to every point b just becomes that obnoxiously slow or jerky driver that our culture seems to be rife with.
ReplyDeleteI basically agree that GPS systems and mapping devices in some ways get in between people and their surroundings. On the other hand, these devices and systems are just the new surroundings.
ReplyDeleteRobert, when you posit that "GPS adds an additional intermediary between ourself and the physical space we inhabit" this suggests that there is such thing as a baseline intermediary between me and physical space; what is that, the body? The mind? Air? Fog? It would be impossible, I think, to ever locate any sort of primary intermediary layer or level between 'me' and 'the world'. Rather, I think we should acknowledge a fluid continuum between whatever it is that 'I' am and the 'space' out there that seems physically other. So what if GPS and the like are in fact bringing us 'closer' because they 'add onto' the continuum between self/other (space)? In other words, maybe the obstruction is in fact another act of connection.
As for the "the news stories of women driving into lakes because that is what their Gps has told them"—was this a real story, or just a parody in an episode of "The Office"? Or maybe it was both, in which case it proves itself as a exceptional case rather than any kind of rule. Sure, people can always do dumb things. But think just how many people use the devices efficiently and effortless every single day to actually, really get from point A to point B. Even if the route is a little odd or not gained 'by instinct'—there is nevertheless a lot of mapping and going places happening here.
Terra: I think that actually sort of depends on the technology. I've seen GPSs, for instance, which factor in the traffic on various streets (no idea how they obtain that information). I think all of the concerns which you describe are things which GPS makers could easily (or difficult-ly) incorporate into their devices-- and I, for one, look forward to the day.
ReplyDeleteI love my GPS. The directions in New Orleans are really screwy-- in a city where the West Bank is due north, who has time to keep track of compass directions? Since obtaining my GPS I've been able, prior to walking somewhere on foot or taking the streetcar, to figure out where the area stands in relation to major streets, where surrounding landmarks are located, and how all of this relates to the river. Could I learn this by driving across the city all the time? Sure, but A. I'd have to drive, which I hate doing, and B. I wouldn't have that holistic understanding of the area in my mind. There is something to be gained, I think, from walking from point A to point B and tracking yourself occasionally on a GPS screen.
In my freshman seminar last year we were told that there are two basic ways people can navigate. Men tend to navigate using a sort of mental map of an area and orient themselves on that map, whereas women tend to navigate using landmarks and their relationship to them. In this respect I suppose I'm very feminine-- all of my mental directions go something like "turn right at that white and red Germanic house"-- and it's exciting for me to be able to plot these landmarks I know so well onto a bird's-eye-view map of the city.
One often hears the trope of "Men are this way, women are that way..." I understand these sorts of claims to be re-inscribing normative expectations for how gender role *should* be. In other words, this isn't a report on a 'natural' state of affairs: it's 'social science' pseudo-report that ends up making people police rigid boundaries between 'the two sexes'. (Boundaries, that is, that are entirely made up and perhaps worth being realized & treated as such.)
ReplyDeleteBut otherwise I really appreciate your revisionist take on GPS mapping, Amelie.
This discussion about mapping, bodily instinct, and physical space reminds me of an idea articulated by Fredric Jameson, in his writings on postmodernism and consumer society:
"postmodern hyperspace...has finally succeeded in transcending the capaciteis of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. ...this alarming disjunction point between the body and the built environmental...can itself stand as the symbol and analog of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects."
Are GPS devices the latest point of convergence or friction between, on the one hand, the individual who wants to be 'located', and on the other hand, the spatial logic of global awareness (and consumption) that assumes a scale and level of dislocation that are mind boggling (and rather arresting) to fathom?
I expected you to attack the gender thing, actually... :)
ReplyDeleteI'll be the first person to advocate for postmodern gender theory, as I think I've proven time and time again in various classes of yours, but I did think it was a useful example. I was trying to reconstruct the fact to be gender neutral but since the fact sort of depends on gender it didn't really work-- I kind of gave up.
Just making sure I haven't damaged my postmodernist cred.
Whew, thanks for the clarification, Amelie. I thought for a moment that I'd have to take away your Critical Theory honor badge.
ReplyDeleteI think see what you are getting at: the way in which GPS mapping actually blurs these as-if gender norms: the GPS mapping device makes a 'woman' more map savvy, and takes away the mapping 'instinct' from the 'man' (interestingly replacing it with a techno-landmark, of sorts: the glitzy little glowing device). In other words, both gender 'norms' have been disrupted by the usefulness of the GPS technology. And the implication, then, is that the 'norms' were never settled in the first place: they were themselves produced by other power/knowledge organizations (home economics, warfare, etc.) Does this sound right?
I think I was headed in that direction, yes, though you put it much better than I would have.
ReplyDelete