FRONTIER - Maphead - page 154

sources that unblurred other sensitive spots, like the White House and the Capitol. Google
finally secured uncensored photography of Chez Cheney and pushed it onto an Earth up-
date as soon as they could—which happened to be Obama's inauguration day. (“I would
have done it sooner had I found the pixels sooner!” McClendon still insists.) Scuffles like
these have forced Google Earth to begin acting, in some ways, as an actual nation-state,
negotiating with governments and even sending its own representative to meetings of the
UN committee on place-names.
Should we be worried about the fact that a single company, however awesome its ro-
tating holiday logos and employee snacks, has this much authoritative influence on the
world's maps? At the dawn of the Internet mapping era, some geographers fretted about a
coming “ McDonaldization ” of cartography, in which maps would become fast food: cheap
andomnipresentbutdrivenbydistant,unaccountablecorporationsconcernedmorewithad
revenue than quality. In reality, far from skimping on quality, Google has continued to add
blow-your-mindfeatures(3-Dunderwaterterrain!StreetView-levelmappingofskitrails! *
Interactive global warming models!) to its maps on a seemingly weekly basis. But Google
Earth's unprecedented detail and popularity have led to more serious concerns about pri-
vacy and security. After all, any map of Mumbai that can help tourists find their hotel can
also help terrorists attack that hotel.
There's not much that Google can do about how its maps are used, but at least their
very popularity provides a safeguard against the map-maker itself, whether it's Google or
Microsoft or Yahoo!, trying to promote any sinister agenda with its maps. After all, every
change they make to their data happens in front of millions of eyeballs. When mistakes are
introduced (or even, if you prefer, when shady cartographic kowtowing takes place), locals
notice and bloggers squawk and problems get fixed. In 2009, towns in the Indian border
state of Arunachal Pradesh were briefly given Chinese names on Google Maps; when hor-
rified Indians reacted, Google admitted its mistake the same day and reverted to the Hindi
names.
Brian McClendon calls Google's Borgesian dream of a centimeter-per-pixel real-time
world map “the end of resolution,” and the phrase shocks me a little with its finality, be-
cause to me it implies the end of all mapmaking, the end of all discovery. It's one of the
central paradoxes of maps: they make the world larger by showing us new vistas, but then
they order and bean-count those new vistas into submission, and the world gets a little
smalleraswell.IfGoogleEarthbecomestheperfectmap,themapofeverything,whyever
draw another one?
McClendon disagrees; he argues that virtual globes have actually led to a renaissance of
discovery. After all, much of the aerial imagery that Google posts, old and new, has never
been seen byhuman eyeballs before, and he'sputting it in front ofmillions ofcurious arm-
chair travelers. “There was so much of it that it was never visually inspected down to the