Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
That's not a troll, it's an 8-ball. I just shook him and his post changed to "PLEASE ASK AGAIN".
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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...
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.