Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [108]
The Mercator and Gall-Peters: Greenland’s favorite and least favorite map projections, respectively
So it’s easy to quibble with McClendon’s assertion that everything on Google’s maps is unimpeachably true in some epistemological sense.† In some ways, it’s as full of judgment calls and compromises as any other map. What he really means is that Google Earth is more convincing, more compelling, than a paper map and that this immersiveness gives it a unique ability to change the way we see the world.
“You trust that this picture is truly of this place. And when people see that, they get an emotional reaction. They feel like they’re really visiting another place, and that’s something no map has ever given before. You look at a traffic jam in Baghdad, and you realize, those guys are not much different than we are. How would it feel if we were getting bombed and we were losing buildings? That’s what’s happening to them right now. Same thing in Tehran. Here are these people that have a very Western city in many regards, but we see them as old-school Islamists that must be living in tents. But they’re not. Tehran looks very European from the air, very densely populated.”
“It sounds like you’re almost saying that Google Earth is an ideological tool to bring peace to real Earth,” I tell McClendon.
He doesn’t hesitate for a minute. “Yes. I say that, and I believe that. If it brings people that we’re purportedly in conflict with close enough to us, then it’s very hard to stay in conflict. If everybody had that—if North Koreans had that and could see what it’s like in L.A. or small-town Middle America—they might not feel so isolated. But they have no access to any information.”* It’s a particularly Google approach to utopia: the notion that information isn’t neutral, that on balance it’s inherently good because of its power to help people understand one another.
At the dawn of the World Wide Web, much was made of the fact that this new “Internet” was a place without place—a geography-less void that was, like God, everywhere and nowhere. Cyberspace was analogous in some ways to space, but it would be navigated virtually, with no relation to our real three-dimensional world at all. There were two problems with this idea. First, it led to crappy “virtual reality” movies like Virtuosity and The Lawnmower Man. And second, in the long run, it turned out to be totally wrong. Fifteen years later, the hottest trend in information is “geotagging”: ensuring that every bit of data on the Internet—every tweet, every YouTube video, every photo on Flickr—is coded with locational metadata tying it to a point on Earth.
Geotags may sound like a small change—just a latitude and a longitude on a Facebook status, big deal!—but they have the potential to revolutionize the Web. The dominant online search paradigm now is one of a librarian: we suggest subjects using keywords (“Tell me about dinosaur fossils” or “Tell me about 401(k) plans”), and resources come off the shelves. But on the “geoweb,” data is indexed by place, not by theme, and so the search engine is a tour guide, not a librarian. You ask, “What’s around here?” (and that query is probably automated, if you have a GPS-enabled phone), and the answers flood in: these friends, these businesses, these photos. In fact, the data is probably customized to the specific kinds of things you’ve decided you’re likely to be looking for: these geocaches, these clients, these Ethiopian restaurants. The Internet overlays itself on the real