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Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge?
Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Moran writes in the BBC News Magazine that Sat-Nav clearly suits an era in which 'map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.' Sat-Nav 'speaks to our contemporary anxieties and preoccupations about the road,' writes Moran. 'More roads and better cars mean we can travel further, and so the risk of getting lost is all the greater.' But do real men use sat-nav? Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like 'make a legal U-turn' and 'recalculating the route', as stubborn or bossy. Still we don't quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. 'Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections,' writes Moran. 'Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.'"
PROBABLY.
You haven't lived until you've been in a car with the Denzel Washington sat-nav voice. "Take a MOTHERFUCKING left turn. NOW" If only there was one for Miss Teen USA South Carolina 2007...
"Except in the UK, The Land Of The One-Way Roads, Where Straight Lines Are Forever Banished"
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB
Good lord! I've heard of run-on sentences but a run-on acronym? I'm just glad you spelled it out for us - otherwise I would have been lost for days.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
"Except in the UK, The Land Of The One-Way Roads, Where Straight Lines Are Forever Banished"
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB
Good lord! I've heard of run-on sentences but a run-on acronym? I'm just glad you spelled it out for us - otherwise I would have been lost for days.
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB, is that Welsh?
Driving is Ireland is really simple because of the efficient layout of our road network.
The directions for anywhere you want to go in Ireland are simple:
1. Drive to directly Dublin
2. Drive to directly your destination
(Being from Dublin, I would suggest that step 2 is unnecessary - but I would say that)
Also, due to the voices, I doubt that we follow GPS at all. If it's English - we'll not listen to it, 600 years of oppression yada yada yada, and if it's Irish, we won't let some muck-savage/D4 ponce tell us what to do.
Although, well probably still end up in the dead-end 'cos that's where all the craic is.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
if real men don't use hammers. I wouldn't use one to open an egg
What's wrong with using a hammer for kitchen tasks? Maybe not opening eggs, but they work great for separating frozen sausages from each other!
Why did you even look at the signs, after all, All Roads Lead to Rome :)
"Except in the UK, The Land Of The One-Way Roads, Where Straight Lines Are Forever Banished"
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB
Good lord! I've heard of run-on sentences but a run-on acronym? I'm just glad you spelled it out for us - otherwise I would have been lost for days.
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB, is that Welsh?
It's got more than one vowel, can't be Welsh.
But do real men use sat-nav?
Of course not -- real men navigate the same way they do everything else; with a mixture of power tools and grenades
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
In 10 B.C., one Josephus Moranivus wrote on papyrus paper bemoaning the fact drawn maps destroys the ability to navigate by dead-reckoning.
One drawback is I can't give directions at ALL, but thats minor to me.
My girlfriend can't either, but unfortunately that doesn't stop her at ALL.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
"To the GP - they aren't trying to kill motorcyclists specifically; they're trying to kill EVERYONE."
As a motorcyclist myself I can say with some authority that while they are trying to kill everyone, most believe that they get bonus points for bikes.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?