Last night on the subway down to the
Lower East Side, where I went to a party in one of those apartments that make you feel like you yourself live in a
Third World hovel, I finished up an article from
last week’s New Yorker about maps. It is really good and I urge your to read it.
The piece was written
by Nick Paumgarten, one of my favorite writers at the magazine, and it examined the history and changing nature of maps
in the human experience. Paumgarten looked at some of the new extraordinary mapping services like Mapquest, that have changed our lives. He goes out on the road with a couple of guys who
actually do some of the human legwork that makes Mapquest accurate, guys who check on whether signs have changed or if a
one-way road is mislabeled. Fascinating stuff. Really.
But more specifically, the piece examined our
relationship to maps and how, with the advent of GPS and online services like Mapquest, our relationship with geography
is changing. How exactly? Well, that’s difficult to say. The old school cartographic folks would say that when we print
out a Mapquest map, we get only a small slice of the world presented to us, a swatch of specific geographic information
that has been separated from the larger picture, a larger picture that is provided when we look at maps the old
fashioned way, all spread out and inviting, revealing the broader world and your place in it. But the new tech folks,
the Mapquesters and the GPS nuts and the folks behind a company called Navteq
suggest that mapping and directions and finding out where you are and where you’re going, all these things are
undergoing a massive revolution that will make sure you never get lost again…and/or that you will never NOT know
where the closest Starbucks is.
Anyway, really good reading.