Life on Autopilot?
Orit Halpern's book, Beautiful Data, suggests that we live not so much in worlds of pure simulation a la Jean Baudrillard (or Philip K. Dick), but instead, in a fascinated relation with flows of signals whose referential nature does not stop them from forming a "new landscape" for the viewer/user. In other words, the data is ostensibly about the world, but it upstages that world, becoming the primary object with which we interact (and thereby impoverishing the rest of experience). Something similar is suggested by Karin Knorr Cetina with her notion of "postsocial relations" carried on with the always-unfolding temporal objects that typically appear on screens, notably in the realm of finance. The stream of flow-objects constitutes a world, one you can dive into, wrestle with, and from which - in the case of financial traders - you dream of emerging victorious. Both these theories have a lot to say about the consumer-oriented GPS navigation systems discussed in the New York Times piece below. I'd argue that these systems arose as a pragmatic answer to the crisis of cognitive mapping brought on by capitalist globalization. Confused about the sprawling labyrinth that used to be your home town - or maybe, about the gleaming new metropolis where you've had to seek another life? No problem, just type in the destination and hit the button. Now the street, and indeed the city itself, become secondary reflections of the one true path streaming in over the phone. Everyone loves satellite mapping, yours truly included, but the ambivalence attaching to all dominant social functions can easily take over, indeed it already has. Life on autopilot is the condition where data takes the wheel, navigating your pathway through a stream of signals from which you never emerge. Here's a thought: Kybernetes, the cybernetic steersman, is the new, far more sophisticated figure replacing the dreamworld that Guy Debord used to call "the spectacle." BH - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Ignore the GPS. That Ocean Is Not a Road. Greg Milner Earlier this month, Noel Santillan, an American tourist in Iceland, directed the GPS unit in his rental car to guide him from Keflavik International Airport to a hotel in nearby Reykjavik. Many hours and more than 250 icy miles later, he pulled over in Siglufjordur, a fishing village on the outskirts of the Arctic Circle. Mr. Santillan, a 28-year-old retail marketer from New Jersey, became an unlikely celebrity after Icelandic news media trumpeted his accidental excursion. Mr. Santillan shouldn't be blamed for following directions. Siglufjordur has a road called Laugarvegur, the word Mr. Santillan -- accurately copying the spelling from his hotel booking confirmation -- entered in lieu of Laugavegur, a major thoroughfare in Reykjavik. The real mystery is why he persisted, ignoring road signs indicating that he was driving away from Iceland's capital. According to this newspaper, Mr. Santillan apparently explained that he was very tired after his flight and had "put his faith in the GPS." Faith is a concept that often enters the accounts of GPS-induced mishaps. "It kept saying it would navigate us a road," said a Japanese tourist in Australia who, while attempting to reach North Stradbroke Island, drove into the Pacific Ocean. A man in West Yorkshire, England, who took his BMW off-road and nearly over a cliff, told authorities that his GPS "kept insisting the path was a road." In perhaps the most infamous incident, a woman in Belgium asked GPS to take her to a destination less than two hours away. Two days later, she turned up in Croatia. These episodes naturally inspire incredulity, if not outright mockery. After a couple of Swedes mistakenly followed their GPS to the city of Carpi (when they meant to visit Capri), an Italian tourism official dryly noted to the BBC that "Capri is an island. They did not even wonder why they didn't cross any bridge or take any boat." An Upper West Side blogger's account of the man who interpreted "turn here" to mean onto a stairway in Riverside Park was headlined "GPS, Brain Fail Driver." But some end tragically -- like the tale of the couple who ignored "Road Closed" signs and plunged off a bridge in Indiana last year. Disastrous incidents involving drivers following disused roads and disappearing into remote areas of Death Valley in California became so common that park rangers gave them a name: "death by GPS." Last October, a tourist was shot to death in Brazil after GPS led her and her husband down the wrong street and into a notorious drug area. If we're being honest, it's not that hard to imagine doing something similar ourselves. Most of us use GPS as a crutch while driving through unfamiliar terrain, tuning out an
Re: Life on Autopilot?
Hallo Brian -- (sending this a third time to nettime and cc'ing it to you as it seems to be delayed by the moderators that are letting other things through...) I had read about the Amurikan tourist in Iceland, and your notes, and thought to re-reflect/meditate on that from a personal/historical Icelandic context: Naming of location is an old social process. It is an association of place with event (long- or short-term). Event may be natural or social. The naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. Local means that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. Embodied means that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. Idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global — it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people *who lived there*. Located story-telling: Physical signage is perhaps the first step in externalizing the naming process. As social structures become more and more global (de-localized), naming structures have evolved that are more and more 'universal'. (Exactly the same process as any kind of socially-driven standardization in engineering, language, and such). GPS, as a numeric cataloging of discrete points on a (socially) abstracted mathematical surface is a specific form of representation. Whydo we struggle to associate events with those places? Are we continuing the inexorable alienation process that separates our social self from non-standardize be-ing? Is there a praxis that can bring these two systems together without the seeming inevitable separation promulgated by a forced deference to standardization? When I lived in Iceland, I quickly grew frustrated with the local cultural system for locating ones-self in the landscape. Coming from a long experience of DMA (Defense Mapping Agency)-based mapping and location activities — USGS topo orienteering, geological and geophysical mapping, remote sensing (low-altitude to satellite-based) — the process of reading, comprehending, and makingthe leap from the ‘coordinated’ map to the territory was a learned but very comfortable intuitive process. Approximating distance, direction, and azimuth vectorsfrom paper to topography was practiced. Watching the stars and sun and making accurate estimations of location and time based on those observations wasalso standard. Iceland presented a radically different paradigm of location. When I would come back to town after a weekend hiking trip, the occasion might arise that I would need to describe where I had been. A typical description would be: "You know the Hellisheidi road?" "Já" "Well about four kilometers past the turnoff to Thorlákshöfn we turned due north and went along a valley on the west flank of a low ridge (the western flank of the mid-Atlantic Ridge!) for 6 kilometers and then crossed a small river and followed it west about a kilometer to the top of a valley leading southeast towards Hvergerdi." This kind description, one which would have been enough to locate one quite accurately in the (contemporary socio-cultural) landscape/orienteering schema of the Sonoran Desert, never elicited much of a response. It was not until after some years of traveling in the remote landscapes of Iceland with native friends that I realized I could simply say that I had gone to Grensdalur. That localized name precisely located a particular place in what is often a disorienting fractal landscape. And indeed, the more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location — creek, molehill, ridge, wash, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm hada specific name. The more local the people one traveled with, the more precise the located naming (where each name itself represented a more-or-less comprehensive story that ‘mapped’ the human occupation of and interaction with thatlocation). The names came out of embedded human understanding of that exact place atthat exact time (or over a period of time). One key to this anecdote is that this system cannot be simulated except at a loss. The loss comes from the separation by greater degrees of mediation between the embodied experience of the place and the means of social transferenceof the experience that ‘names’ it. It would seem that the embodied, lived experience is the primary source of placement, but equally important is the propagationmethod that locks a nam(e)ing / story to the place in the collective memory. Using a newer system will not allow a utopian ‘return’ to another, older, system. They exist in parallel to some degree, and they are different paradigms and ultimately different living socio-cultural practices. As to GPS: "The global positioning system is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way." -- from a NYT article shilling GPS units for Christmas in 2007 Wow,
Re: Life on Autopilot?
Hallo,
As Brian says :
Le 11 févr. 2016 à 22:18, Brian Holmes a
écrit :
Everyone loves satellite mapping, yours truly included, but the
ambivalence attaching to all dominant social functions can easily take
over, indeed it already has.
This is a fascination I share with him, albeit that I have always been
fascinated with maps, back from the paper era - I could read maps
before I could read text.
Computer based maps raise a whole series of questions relative to their
paper predecessors. The question of scale, for example, since
theoretically, a single computer map is sufficient, as it contains the
entire globe and one's neighbourhood at one and the same time - one
just zooms in and out. However, a map of this sort is reduced to basic
geometric information, topography, roads, land occupation. What is lost
today is the at close quarters, art-orientated chorographic vision of
territory, which was written about by Ptolemy and rediscovered in the
Renaissance. Chorography was used to create mappings that are both
topographique and topopoetic, to quote the philosopher Edward S. Casey.
The eye of the artist, sensitivity towards terrain and habitat were the
driving force.
I am trying to reflect on these questions in a thesis on "What Makes
Place" ("Ce qui fait lieu") in which maps play an important part. Part
of the research has been making an interactive, participative,
sensitive map of Greater Paris.
You can visit it here : http://www.mongrandparis.fr
For English explanations :
http://mongrandparis.fr/a-map-of-greater-paris-for-the-21st-century/
Bises -
Joseph Rabie.
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