Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ition of the sun in the sky, but that's okay because my wristwatch works just fine. But the
end of navigation might be more serious. Reckoning with our environment isn't a single
skill;it'sawholewebofspatialsensesandabilities,manysofundamentalthatwecan'taf-
ford to lose them to machines. We know that thinking hard about navigation is what grows
those neurons in our brains—what happens if we quit exercising those cells and they get
flabby? Society is geared toward shrinking the hippocampus,” says Véronique Bohbot, a
Montreal professor of psychiatry who specializes in spatial memory. “In the next twenty
years, I think we're going to see dementia occurring earlier and earlier.”
As a species, the loss of our spatial abilities might be a tragedy, but to a map nerd, an
even sadder casualty of the digital map revolution might be paper maps themselves. As I
wander into downtown Seattle's biggest map store, I notice immediately that its new loc-
ation, near the tourist-packed Pike Place Market, displays fewer travel maps than the pre-
vious store did. The cabinet of USGS topographical maps on the back wall is usually left
alone; hikers get the trail maps they need on their cell phones. “The map business has
slowed down a lot,” the store's co-owner tells me. She gestures vaguely to a rack of fol-
ded pocket maps. “When a new map like that came out, we used to have to order twenty,
twenty-five of them, or we'd sell out. Now we're lucky to sell one or two. We hope we
can stay alive by diversifying.” Indeed, this nominal “map store” now fills most of its
space with travel items (backpacks and guidebooks) and vaguely geographical gifts (na-
tional flags, dodecahedral Earth globes, and novelty wall maps that use some design gim-
mick—$3,500 in rare hardwoods, for example, or cleverly placed notes on a series of mu-
sical staffs—to delineate the continents).
Allen Carroll, the chief cartographer at National Geographic, tells me that he's not wor-
ried about the market, because printed maps and Internet maps fulfill different functions.
“So far, we haven't found that our atlas sales have been hurt by the Internet. Very different
than is the case, obviously, with encyclopedias.” Encyclopedia publishers like Britannica
were caught unawares by the rise of CD-ROM encyclopedias in the 1990s, and their sales
collapsed by 83 percent in just five years. Atlases may hold out longer, because no digital
platform has yet managed to deliver browsable maps, in all their detail and versatility, as
wellaspapercan.Butwhathappenswhenthatplatformarrives,asitinevitablywill?Could
one killer iPad app doom atlases forever?
I may be part of the last generation to harbor a peculiar nostalgia for paper maps that
stubbornly refuse to zoom or scroll or layer—in fact, that stubbornly refuse even to refold
themselves into the neat rectangle you found in the glove compartment. That's what it is:
nostalgia. Paper maps remind me of school libraries and the backseat of the family car on
vacation. Pleasant times.
The name on nearly all those maps was “Rand McNally,” America's best-known and
best-selling map publisher for most of the last century. Founded in Chicago in 1868,
the partnership between a Boston printer and a poor Irish immigrant soon branched out
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