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

[zzyzx-xyzzy.livejournal.com]

The larger issue is I can't imagine what you could possibly mean for map reading to be lost. 'map reading' to me is the cognitive ability to assign correspondences between a visual representation and an object, and to make deductions about the object from its representation. It encompasses reading scale drawings, or IKEA instructions, or navigating a web site, or working the menu on an ATM; It's a large portion of what an IQ test is going after; it's not in any danger as long as the Flynn effect doesn't backtrack by several hundred years.

Well, of course you might mean something way more banal, like the bag of tricks associated with the specific map-reading practice of correlating positions on a printed image to positions on the geoid. That's like long division: the people who have a need to deeply know how it works... will learn it just fine, because the ability to work through correspondences between representation and represented isn't going anywhere (and, I would argue, is only placed under more demand and thereby enhanced by technology like your android phone.)

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Skills like: Finding your position on a map with minimal prior information. That is a very hard thing to do if you're not on a street grid, and often quite hard even then. Or how to read contour lines. How to decide between alternate routes based on the information on the map, like knowing wiggly lines are longer and slower. Generally, how to generate a mental model of an area based on a map, instead of just using it to find the nearest Starbucks icon.

That said, computer maps are teaching people new map skills that they never needed before. Like interpreting aerial photography, which used to be a skill only cartographers and CIA analysts ever learned. Now most everyone I know finds it second nature to estimate the height of a building based on the length of its shadow. So that's pretty cool.

[pielology.livejournal.com]

Some of these skills are "gone" already - my college geology classes involved lessons on how to read contour maps, and most people needed them.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

The vast majority of the folks coming through search and rescue training -- who have been spending lots of time in the middle of nowhere ALL THEIR LIVES -- have absolutely no idea how to do any of these things. Most of them can't even understand the concept of marking sightline bearings to a landmark.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

thanks for clarifying.