Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [112]
GPS navigation is usually the whipping boy in this argument. Every driver who heads off a cliff or onto railroad tracks just because the GPS voice told him to—and there are thousands of these stories—is a symptom of a culture that is increasingly outsourcing its spatial thinking to technology, and once those jobs are gone, they may not come back. My favorite news story of GPS-crutch incompetence is that of an unnamed Swedish couple trying to drive from Venice to the sunny isle of Capri in 2009. Unfortunately, they accidentally misspelled the name of their destination when they entered it into their GPS, and arrived a few hours later at the industrial northern town of Carpi, where they wandered into the town hall and asked confused officials how to get to the Blue Grotto, Capri’s famous sea cave. (The officials there assumed that “the Blue Grotto” must be some local restaurant they’d never heard of.) Ten seconds with a map, of course, would have told these tourists that
• you can’t make the four-hundred-mile drive from Venice to Capri in just two hours;
• Capri is southeast of Venice, not west;
• and, crucially, that it’s a small island, and the couple hadn’t crossed a bridge or used a boat to get to Carpi, which is located on a landlocked inland plain!
But they didn’t look at a map. They trusted GPS.
The decline of our wayfinding abilities didn’t begin with GPS, of course. Nomadic cultures like the Bedouins still use all kinds of natural wayfinding cues in the stars and camel tracks that a modern American would never see because we’ve been able to rely on roads and signs and so forth in our cozy urban lives. Many human skills ceded to technology are no great loss—I’m not as good as my ancestors were at telling time based on the position 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’s a whole web of spatial senses and abilities, many so fundamental that we can’t afford 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 location, near the tourist-packed Pike Place Market, displays fewer travel maps than the previous 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 folded 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 (national flags, dodecahedral Earth globes, and novelty wall maps that use some design gimmick—$3,500 in rare hardwoods, for example, or