* * * * *
                                        
                             I'm sensing a trend …
                                        
> In June, Al Byrd's three-bedroom home, built by his father on the western
> outskirts of Atlanta, was mistakenly torn down by a demolition company. “I
> said, ‘Don't you have an address?’ ” a distraught Byrd later recounted. “He
> said, ‘Yes, my GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates led me right to
> this address here.’ ” The incident joined a long list of satellite-guided
> blunders, including one last year in which a driver in Bedford Hills, New
> York, obeyed instructions from his GPS to turn right onto a set of train
> tracks, where he got stuck and had to abandon his car to a collision with a
> commuter train. Incredibly, the same thing happened to someone else at
> exactly the same intersection nine months later. In Europe, narrow village
> roads and country lanes have turned into deadly traps for truckers blindly
> following GPS instructions, and an insurance company survey found that
> 300,000 British drivers have either crashed or nearly crashed because of
> the systems.
> 
> …
> 
> To many, the beauty of the devices is precisely that we no longer have any
> need to painstakingly assemble those cognitive maps. But Cornell University
> human-computer interaction researcher Gilly Leshed argues that knowledge of
> an area means more than just finding your way around. Navigation underlies
> the transformation of an abstract “space” to a “place” that has meaning and
> value to an individual. For the GPS users Leshed and her colleagues
> observed in an ethnographic study, the virtual world on the screens of
> their devices seemed to blur and sometimes take over from the real world
> that whizzed by outside. “Instead of experiencing physical locations, you
> end up with a more abstract representation of the world,” she says.
> 
> On a snowmobile trip of over 500 kilometres across the Arctic, this
> blurring of the real and the virtual became obvious to Carleton University
> anthropologist Claudio Aporta. Returning from Repulse Bay to Igloolik, a
> village west of Baffin Island where he was conducting fieldwork, he and an
> Inuit hunter became engulfed in fog. The hunter had been leading the way
> along traditional routes, guided by the winds, water currents, animal
> behaviour, and features such as the uqalurait, snowdrifts shaped by
> prevailing winds from the west by northwest. Like London taxi drivers,
> Inuit hunters spend years acquiring the knowledge needed to find their way
> in their environment, part of a culture in which “the idea of being lost or
> unable to find one's way is without basis in experience, language, or
> understanding — that is, until recently,” as Aporta and Eric Higgs wrote in
> a 2005 paper on “satellite culture” and the rise of GPS use in Igloolik.
> 
> Heavy fog is the one condition that stymies even the most expert Inuit
> navigators. The traditional response is to wait until the fog lifts, but,
> knowing that Aporta had mapped the outbound journey on his GPS, his guide
> asked him to lead the way on his snowmobile. “It was an incredible
> experience, because I could see absolutely nothing,” he recalls. “I didn't
> know if there was a cliff ahead; I was just following the GPS track for
> five kilometres, blind, really.” This was the extreme version of the city
> driver blankly turning left and right at the command of his GPS, and it
> required a leap of faith. “Believe me,” he says, chuckling, “I was sweating
> like crazy.”
> 
> The demonstrable benefits of GPS have, however, removed much of the
> incentive for the younger generation in Igloolik to undertake the arduous
> process of learning traditional navigation techniques. Elders worry about
> this loss of knowledge, for reasons that go beyond the cultural—a straight
> line across an empty icefield plotted by GPS doesn't warn about the thin
> ice traditional trails would have skirted. Dead batteries and frozen
> screens, both common occurrences in the harsh Arctic conditions, would also
> be disastrous for anyone guided solely by technology.
> 

Via Hacker News [1], “The Walrus Magazine » Global Impositioning Systems [2]”

I think there's a connection between overreliance on the GPS and my unease
with the Drupal User's Group [3] yesterday, but it's still a bit tenuous …
but there is a connection …

And one story somewhat related to the article: when I visited my friends in
Boston [4], I had no sense of the city (other than being a twisty maze of one
way streets, all alike) because we always took the T [5], which was for the
most part, below ground. We'd descend into an underground station, enter a
train, wait a bit, exit the train and ascend into a new part of the city—a
linear stretch of Bostonian islands as it were.

I found it rather disconcerting, but I never did get lost.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899639
[2] http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/2009.11-health-
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2009/10/22.1
[4] http://www.cityofboston.gov/
[5] http://www.mbta.com/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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