Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
proceeded by trial and error, tweaking numbers at random in the unintelligible text rep-
resenting map layout, just to see what would happen. A few weeks later, he ran his script
and watched a scatter of apartments appear in his browser, neatly forming the shape of the
San Francisco peninsula. It was the first Google Earth “mashup” ever created, but within a
month there were dozens of copycats using Rademacher's code. Gas prices, movie show-
times, red-light cameras, package tracking, street crime—it seemed as if almost everything
people wanted to look up on the Internet was a little more convenient displayed on a map.
“We all just hadn't realized that a map could be a platform,” says Rademacher, who
today works for Google Maps API team, managing the same interfaces he once hacked.
Maps are millennia old, one of the earliest forms of representation ever devised by human-
kind, but new mobile technology has given them new versatility, and the result has been
a map renaissance. Twenty years ago, most people probably consulted a map once every
week or so, when they needed help navigating a highway or a shopping mall. Today it's
not unusual for smartphone owners to check a map many times an hour, for things that
we wouldn't have associated with geography at all ten years ago—not just “Where's Ro-
mania?” but “Where's my pizza?” For geonerds, accustomed to the public perception of a
map as something démodé and dull, it's like living in a golden age.
Wayne Coyne, the lead singer of the beloved indie-rock band the Flaming Lips, may
of Coyne's street in Oklahoma City included puzzling shots of the front man sitting, fully
clothed, in a bathtub on his front lawn. He explained to an interviewer that he'd been try-
ing out some props to scare neighborhood kids at a Halloween party and had no idea he
was about to be immortalized by Google's amazingly comprehensive street photography.
“A car that drives around on every street with a 360-degree camera?” he marveled. “We
live in f——ing good times, don't we?”
Butforeveryebullient WayneCoyne,itseems,there'ssomegloomyCassandra warning
against the new maps and the technologies they leverage. If you thought the worst part
of location-based services was going to be advertisements that annoy you by name as
you walk past them, like in
Minority Report,
think again. Jerome Dobson, a GIS pioneer
and president of the American Geographical Society, has coined the word “
geoslavery
”
to
refer to the potential threat to our privacy and autonomy that GPS-powered maps might
someday pose. If everything you do is geotagged, then everyone always knows where you
are—which is awesome if you're hoping to meet some friends after work for a drink but
maybenotsoawesomeifpotentialburglarsarecasingyourneighborhoodtofindoutwho's
not home, or if you're dealing with an abusive ex or a child predator or even some stranger
who got mad about something you posted online. We're an Orwellian dystopia in the mak-
ing, says Dobson, except that no shadowy government will be providing the surveillance.
Instead, we're opting to do it to ourselves.
