It was a happy coincidence that on a long flight from Hong Kong I stumbled upon an article in the International Herald Tribune about location tracking that was so much up my alley that a slightly more sleep-deprived and jet-lagged traveler might have suspected he was being set up by some shadowy Matrix manipulator. The first part of the article argued that there is an avalanche of new location-based applications for smart phones -- which is true. And there's a suggestion that Google's new Latitude service will be a powerful force in the commercialization of location information. Too soon to tell. My fumbling efforts with Latitude left me less than thrilled, but conditions were not ideal -- I was struggling with a GPS logger bluetoothed to my smartphone -- according to my tech advisor on all things GPS this is a recipe for bewildering hocus pocus that may or may not work and either way you'll never really know why.
It's fairly obvious why a comprehensive database describing where people go and what they do there (=what they buy there) could be of interest to those in the business of doing business, though given that only 10% of people use phone maps, there's a bit of market penetration that has to happen first.
But for me the most interesting and perplexing part of this somewhat scattered article had to do with the argument that map-based applications like this are so powerful because the human brain has some kind of natural affinity for map-based information. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO is quoted as suggesting that "Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective" which given my own bias that humans are pretty middling navigators took me a bit by surprise. I've always believed that an important contributor to the geo-everything fascination is the fact that most of us spend much of our lives not really knowing where the heck we are. There's just something deeply fascinating about being able to use a little chunk of electronics linked up to space satellites to follow one's own movements through large scale space with the same precision that a desert ant calls on to find its way home across a wide span of desert. Sure, we have maps in our heads, but they're not much like Google Maps. They're more like squishy sheets of rubber with a quirky labelling system that sometimes works well and at other times causes us to make the most astonishing errors.
So yes I think there's something deeply interesting about our love affair with mapping, location-based services, GPS, geotagged photographs and all the rest of it, but I don't think that what's happening is that all of this technology is awakening some slumbering set of powerful navigational abilities in us. On the contrary, I think it is all so interesting because it is giving us access to a precise toolkit for locating ourselves that's very much akin to what some other animals possess but nothing like what we use to limp around in space.
Paul Mercer, another source for the article suggests, intriguingly, that the great mapping interface, the Macintosh of Maps, akin to the Windows breakthrough for personal computing, has yet to be made. The idea that there may be some powerful, intuitive map based interface that will revolutionize our use of handheld devices to connect with the physical world kept me awake for the first few hours of my flight. Imagine if substantial numbers of us lived in a kind of perpetual state of spatial attunement to one another and to the world in which, without a second thought, we always knew which way to turn and how far to walk or drive to connect with someone we knew (or didn't) or with some kind of resource. I imagined spending my waking hours wired into some kind of ambient computing device that placed me on a map with everything I cared about. If substantial numbers of us had that kind of connection to place, how much would change?
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