Map reading

[gfish]

Earlier this year I offhandedly mentioned the loss of map-reading skills due to the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices. I meant it seriously, but purely abstractly. It was in the context of finding supplies after a collapse of civilization scenario, after all! Since then, however, I've spent 6 months with a modern smartphone. This now seems like a very real, very immediate issue.

I love maps. Anyone who knows me even slightly will back me up on this. I love maps so much I've accidentally made multiple friends into cartographers, once through a class recommendation and once through a startup project. I love maps, map reading, map making, everything. I own a sextant. I tried using Polynesian etak skills while biking to Portland once. Hell, I once started a project in middleschool to survey the hill I grew up on, just because working out the angles sounded fun and I'd been impressed with the links between surveying and the roots of math as described in one of the James Burke documentaries. (I didn't get very far. Mostly I just made sure to research geometry as quickly as possible when playing Civilization.)

I say this not (entirely) to brag, but to set the stage. For the last six months, I've looked at maps more frequently than any time since the Mackenzie trip thanks to my phone -- but I'm interacting with them on a vastly more shallow level of comprehension. I just don't have to anymore. This has been technically true for a long time, but the ease with which I can get my exobrain to take care of navigation now is just staggering. It's so very easy that I'm really finding it impossible to avoid. And if I'm not bothering, I can't imagine anyone except a vanishingly small percentage of people ever will.

Map reading dies with this generation.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I can't bring myself to buy a GPS unit. Partly because it's hard for me to understand the words "left" and "right." Not the concepts, just the words, which I never learned as a child, and can only rcall with mnemonics. So verbal directions confuse and delay me.

Truth be told, I can't make sense of verbal directions (over the phone, for instance) without a map in front of me. And I envy cultures where people specify even small, household, directions by north, south, east, and west.

But the big reason I won't buy a GPS is because all the units I see present the landscape in a "bird's eye" perspective view, instead of as a map. I find that presentation insulting, like a visual baby-talk, as if I weren't adult enough to use a real map.

But I do love Google maps, and often download multiple views of a destination at different scales.

In fact, to the extend that I can learn my students' names, I learn to associate the name with a geographical location in the room before I connect a face with them.

Maps are good.

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

Almost all GPS navs can be set to 2d, straight down view. Most can even be set to north-up.

[maellenkleth]

Not to mention that the GPS constellation continues to exist at the forbearance of the Chinese, who have already demonstrated their skills at the targeted destruction of satellites.

Oh, also, do you remember the days of 'selective availability'?