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

[basal-surge.livejournal.com]

I'm not so sure about that - how many of the GPS enabled devices use a map like interface to communicate with their users? Although the morons will just follow the 'turn here' voice on their Tom-Tom, the enthused will still use it as an interactive map.

[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]

Did pocket calculators herald the last generation to learn math?

[maellenkleth]

I will assure you that engineers and soldiers both are still being taught, and using in their customary work, the skills of map-reading, field sketching and land navigation. I would have never tolerated any of my troops' sole dependence upon the GPS or similar systems such as GLONASS.

Whether the lumpenproletariat will still be able to read maps is another question altogther. But, then again, I invite you to hold in mind the general decay of what passes for literacy. That is what I find most frightening.

[zanfur.livejournal.com]

Along the lines of what you're saying above, and it's peculiar how the software has slowly shunted users toward using the navigation features. I've been using smartphone mapping software for a number of years now, and it's actually hard to avoid the gps navigation now...there are "navigate here!" buttons all over the place. And when I actually want to get directions, there's a single button for "navigate" and a 4-click process for "show me a route".

I find that I use the traffic display function of mapping software more than anything else, but I'm one of those guys that loves backroads, and can typically get where I'm going without touching a freeway.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Are you using route planning or just looking at maps? I don't trust 'pooters to do the former for me; I just want the picture.

And you know what? If ravers in this area survive, they'll read maps too, because they party in the middle of nowhere.

[chaoswolf]

Map reading dies with this generation.

I disagree. I've been reading maps for Chez Starport's annual trip to loscon for 7 years.

I also keep a map of Seattle in my motorcycle backpack, because 9 times out of 10 I am in Downtown Seattle on my own, and need to figure out where something is. I've gotten quite good with maps over the years.

And technoshaman will back me. He says "you're wrong."