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But are Google Maps users really quite that happy with their product, Charley? It does seem, from the accounts collated by technosceptics like Nicholas Carr, that there is a significant level of dissatisfaction with the mapping/GPS apps of smartphones. Users seem to feel frustrated by the gap between the pretensions of the technology and the experience of using the technology. Google Maps boasts about reproducing the world with unprecedented accuracy, but many users feel it continually misrepresents their world. They complain about missing landmarks and favourite routes. In an interesting article for the Washington Post Carr argued that Google Maps was not only getting many of its users lost and some of its users killed, but that it was diminishing their mental world and their mental functioning:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060402030.html The hubristic claims of Google Maps and its rivals are based on a misunderstanding of the way we read maps and, more broadly, the way we understand reality. You can't have an objective map of the world when map reading, and our experience of the world in general, has an ineluctably subjective component. Google Maps and co want to deny the subjective aspect of our experience of past because there isn't an easy way to profit from it. CheersScott ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
