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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.'"
If this is true it will be just like speed dial and later the cell phone contact list. Yes we did lose the ability to recite everybody's number, but we rarely miss it. If we don't have our cell phone we call information, if our satnav breaks we will use google maps on a smart phone.... in the long run its just no big deal.
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If you're worried about "what major cities to go through" then you're no longer talking about "local knowledge". I think it's more talking about the fact that people who rely on sat-nav don't generally know the back streets as well as they used to.
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What's destroying local knowledge is the video baby-sitters in the back-seat. When I was a kid we knew what our neighborhood LOOKED like. These days kids just stare at the screen in the headrest in front of them from the time they pull away until they get where they're going. I'll bet half of them couldn't find their way home if you dropped them off two blocks away.
-B-
Completely accurate. I bought a gps the same week I got my license. Before that I'd always drive with my parents and they would navigate for me, just trying to be helpful.
Half the time when im out, I have no idea where I am. I am where my gps told me to be. This bothers me sometimes, but the tradeoff is that I can literally go anywhere I want. Now when people start to tell me directions I just tune out and know I'll just do what the gps says. I can and have driven across the state with no problem.
One drawback is I can't give directions at ALL, but thats minor to me.
But just a counter point to play devils advocate: you dont need to use turn by turn directions, you can just use it as a small backlit map that is constantly showing you where you are. Beats unfolding paper.
With Nokia Maps/Ovi Maps, Nokia for example are making it possible to both know exactly where you are, but also where everything you are interested in round about you is, how to get to it and making it possible to share it instantly with anyone else you think might be interested.
It's the end of the locality of local knowledge. Not of the locality or of the knowledge itself. Or put another way, local knowledge goes global.
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I find that having a GPS makes it easier to learn the local streets, since it shows me where I am on the map at all times. Otherwise I have to spend all my time trying to figure our what that tiny street sign says and I miss everything else.
Local knowledge is just that - local. If you live there, you have the knowledge. How can GPS destroy that? And you know what? The article does not argue how it does. GPS is used for new routes. It's new knowledge. Nobody uses Sat-Nav repeatedly for the same destination.
Sat-Nav and GPS are tools - the article poses a question akin to asking if real men don't use hammers. I wouldn't use one to open an egg, but I would use one to fix my stairs.
I am as much a psychogeographer as anyone who loves to discover a city by getting lost in it, but if I am crossing the country (in my case, Belgium) to buy something, I would like to be efficient about getting there.
I can see the utility of satnavs, but speaking for myself, I don't really see any need for one. Yes it could avoid my taking a wrong turn from time to time. But unless I was a gadget freak, would it really be worth my while carrying yet another piece of junk around in my car to save maybe 10 minutes a year finding my way back onto the right road?
As for maps (road maps that is), of course they are indispensable if you're going some place you don't know. If I want to get to Szekesfehervar I have to at least have an idea where the damned place is before I set out. By any stretch of the imagination, I don't see how using a map is severing me from a real place and reducing the world to lines on a piece of paper.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
The problem is, of course, that you are entirely wrong.
Yes, you need to know every one of those things, except maybe the difference between magnetic and true north (unless you're close to the north pole, anyway) because GPSes are, get this, sometimes wrong. Or worse, they don't work at all.
I was driving the other day on an Ontario highway. I don't live in Ontario, so I was using my GPS. Guess what: the GPS had an outdated map, so it got lost. I didn't because I know how to use a map besides a GPS, and because I can read road signs.
What Joel says is exactly right - nobody gets to be a good programmer without having good knowledge of the underlying systems. Oh, you can be passable and earn a decent living, but all the really good ones know exactly how the CPU is going to execute their code and how all the different parts fit together. The same thing goes for any other part of life. You can get around fine without worrying too much about how your GPS works or about the finer details of cartography, but when it comes down to it, anyone who can use a map is automatically better at navigating than someone who can't because there are going to be situations where a GPS just isn't going to be good enough, and even if you never come across those, knowing how to use a map will make you better at following directions, anyway, much like knowing how the CPU works can help you even when you're writing in a high level language.
Last year, my friend I went to a cottage , I reached first thanks to my tomtom, he got lost and called me for directions, I said "I dunno, the GPS got me here!". After struggling for an hour, he stepped into a big box store along the way in a small town and picked up a GPS, got there in about an hour after that.
To be fair to you and your friend, neither of you had any local knowledge to destroy-- that's why you both needed the GPS. What was missing that we used to use was a set of turn by turn directions on paper which you could read to him over the phone when he called.
Really, the question is silly. People who rely on GPS don't have local knowledge to destroy. In situations where they do, they ignore the GPS and use it instead. I use my GPS daily to find work sites I've never been to, but the ones I have, I spend a lot of time ignoring the GPS's instructions. "Make a left here onto the most congested street in the city", it suggests, while I retort "no, you idiot, I'm going to parallel that street on a small side street where there's no traffic". My GPS is good at reading a map, but it's a complete moron when it comes to actual local knowledge. Where the GPS shines is at giving accurate turn-by-turn directions based on your current position, which is a hell of an improvement over the kind of human generated guidance we used to have to put up with: "turn down the street with all the trees along it and turn left where the old schoolhouse used to be; when you see the big oak tree, you've gone too far". GPS isn't destroying local knowledge. It's just destroying infuriatingly bad directions generated by people with no navigation skills.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I second that emotion, man. GPS works great as device that reads a map aloud, maybe a slight step up from a passenger with a road atlas. Local knowledge trumps GPS every single time, however, because GPS devices can't make decisions based on information that isn't necessarily related to getting from point A to B. GPS can't tell you to avoid such-and-such street because it's a really rough part of town, nor can it tell you that Local Sports Team is playing a home game today at 5:00 PM, so if you drive too close to the stadium you'll be stuck in traffic for two hours. Also, from personal experience I can tell you that GPS doesn't always work accurately in places like Baltimore, MD or Washington, DC, places where the whims of urban development have created streets that are one-way during some hours of the day and two-way during others, and where a straight(ish) street will change names four times over five blocks, or where some streets are really more like paved alleys.
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The turn-by-turn electronic voice is merely a crutch for people who can't read maps. People will continue to give horrible directions even with GPS. Bottom line: learn to navigate with a map and compass.
I can't even count the number of times some well meaning person tried to give me directions like, "it's on the right side of Foobar Avenue".
So then I ask "Is that the right side as you're headed east or headed west?" and they freeze up as their eyes glaze over. Sometimes I try to help by rephrasing the question like "well, is it on the north or south side of Foobar Avenue?", and of course they're still helpless. Too many people have no concept of cardinal directions and no idea how to dead reckon from one point to another without familiar landmarks. If these kind of people ever found themselves in unfamiliar territory they'd be screwed.
And what if I'm driving by myself? Awfully inconvenient to have to pull out a map every half and hour to get the next set of directions. Or if I run into a road closure/construction/heavy traffic and need to make a detour. Or if I need to find something that is not on a map (the nearest parking garage in the city, the nearest gas station as I cruise along the highway).
Turn by turn navigation is a tool. It tells me when and where I need to turn. It means I can concentrate on driving instead of remembering that the turn I'm looking for is three blocks after Water Street. It means I don't have to slow down in traffic to try and decide if this is the turn I want only to find out that it's not forcing me to cut back into traffic like a madman. It means I am never lost even if I miss a turn. It just buzzes about recalculating and then finds me a route back. Is it perfect? No - it has more than once directed me to make an illegal left hand turn. But when I'm going somewhere for the first time I don't leave home without it. I'm a better driver with it in the car. I'm a safer driver with it in the car.