Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
economy hit an output peak on 29 December 1989 and then began the long
'lost decade' that rolled into two decades, although, post 2008 crash, maybe
these decades were not so much 'lost' as 'realistic'. It is easily possible to be
producing too much, just as it is possible to try to control too much.
There was far more behind the first visualization revolution in academia
than new technology and the hunt for economic power. Maps and charts, by
containing information, have always been a key to power and social control.
Their origins in military conquest are replicated today by efforts in (spy satellite)
image processing and (battle ground control) geographic information systems.
Just as the clock allowed the timing of people's lives to be controlled, so the
map permitted regulation of spatial movement and enclosure of land.
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Today,
these are combined in information systems which, with visual capability, create
new possibilities for technocratic control, through determining the accepted image
of the world.
Another aspect of visualization is seen though the possibilities it holds to
reveal the injustice and inequalities in the world and to show these pictures to
more than just the bureaucrats and administrators.
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Images are becoming the
currency of the information age. We are now used to receiving much of our
understanding through the flat screen. Despite publishing more, we are currently
reading less and viewing more.
To communicate we must compete with others' graphics. How better than
through our own graphics? This would be another step change in how humans
communicate and show displeasure, agreement and contributory or conflicting
ideas. We have always drawn images, from before we could write, but what if
we could draw so much faster and clearer than before?
Showing different images of the world by using new ways of depicting the
information we have has always caused fear. For instance, there was once a time
when the simple traditional Mercator map was viewed as a little too powerful an
information transmission device to allow the knowledge it presented to be shared
with ordinary mortals, especially with school children. Geographical knowledge
has been long recognised for the power it offers. Prior to 1900 in England, it
was said that:
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The history of the use of maps for social control is well documented: 'Maps impinged invisibly
on the daily lives of ordinary people. Just as the clock, as a graphic symbol of centralised political
authority, brought “time discipline” into the rhythms of industrial workers, so too the lines on maps,
dictators of a new agrarian topography, introduced a dimension of “space discipline”. In European
peasant societies, former commons were now subdivided and allotted, with the help of maps, and
in the “wilderness” of former Indian lands in North America, boundary lines on the map were a
medium of appropriation which those unlearned in geometrical survey methods found impossible to
challenge' (Harley, 1988, p. 285).
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Technical change brings little that is fundamentally different: 'Are we returning to a new Dark
Ages? Will the GIS specialists become the new priestly class, determining our image of the world
just as surely as did the makers of the MAPPAE MUNDI?' (Harley, 1990, p. 15).
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