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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.'"
Sure, and taking someones picture will steal their soul as well. And now you can get a camera and a GPS in a single convenient package, so you can both take the souls of the natives _and_ conveniently avoid their local culture at the same time!
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, my GPS has brought me to more interesting places than I care to count, places I would never have visited without this handy tool pointing the way (or at least helping not to get lost). I'm sure the next generation won't even know what the phrase "getting lost" really means, just as being "out of contact" will have no meaning to them. A map will be about as useful to them as a sextant is to us (what? You sold yours on Ebay years ago? Shameful!). And personally, I wish them all the best with it!
This isn't just satnav. I don't know many people who can remember how they got somewhere just after they drove with somebody dictating directions. My theory is that "left here... second right..." kind of directions turns off (or reduces the need for) the area of the brain that would normally be tracking where you actually are in relation to where you are actually going.
I was way behind the curve in getting a sat-nav even though it fits the kind of tech-gadget market that should interest me. You're absolutely right that a sat-nav isn't vital for travel, but then nor were road signs if you have a map, a map isn't important if someone wrote the route down for you and writing it down isn't required if you just remember it in your head....
The point of a sat-nav isn't to make the impossible possible, it is to provide a quick and easy way to do something and a safety blanket if you go wrong. I must of used my sat-nav 50+ times now and the only time it has been really advantageous was when I got caught in a 5 mile queue of still traffic at a junction between motorways. I got it to plan an alternative that didn't use the next motorway and got home virtually as fast as originally planned. Yes it would be possible to get my map out and look for alternatives, but sat-nav does it quickly, optimally and can compare distances and times more easily, what's there not to like?
Oh, I'd love to have a GPS unit to use as my in-car 'minimap'. I'd never rely on one (in my home city at least) because a large part of effective commuting is knowing the traffic patterns. I find I can shave 10 minutes off a 50 minute journey simply by knowing which lanes snarl up where at what time of day.
:P ) in that it's a good tool for experts, but it can hinder the development of expert skills by beginners.
I guess a GPS unit is a bit like code generation tools (zomg a backwards car analogy!
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Most of the digital mapping data misses out a lot of local features. Even the Tele Atlas data that Google maps uses is buggy and in Western Europe misses minor roads, and I've even seen it miss junctions between major roads. In Eastern Europe it often misses entire roads and cities (e.g. compare the capital of Albania on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap .
Even in Western Europe, the digital map makers miss stuff like cycle and walking trails. If you look at a detailed map like the British Ordnance Survey, which has been built upon local knowledge for hundreds of years, you'll see an amazing amount of information that is missed in the digital maps. I was surprised the first time I looked up my local area and saw that even the tiniest woods were named, and every hill was named and had elevation data. This is local data that almost no-one cares about anymore, but it still seems a shame to lose the history. I think the future is this kind of local data encoded in a modern digital open-standard format, and the only project I see doing this kind of work is OpenStreetMap.
One drawback is I can't give directions at ALL, but thats minor to me."
That's wierd, becauseI can not only give someone step by step directions, I can tell them exactly how much distance to travel on each road before making a turn and lot's of other information, even if I don't possess personal knowledge of the route and/or destination ! . Hell, I can even E-Mail them a hard copy if they want. Allow me to introduce you to my magical secret !
In other news, the existence of technologies such as refrigeration and gun powder have greatly reduced the abilities of most to survive as a hunter gatherer. This is a pretty huge concern, and somebody should really write an article to warn us of all the dangers!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
In the parent's defense, events strong enough to distrupt GPS comms do not have to be on the scale of the Carrington Event that you mentioned. From
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/06may_carringtonflare.htm
In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, "I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes."
The same article says
On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents, as happened in 1989. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare.
Granted, recent the recent flare-related GPS disruption didn't last several days, but large flares do happen on a fairly regular basis (the article mentions 'huge' storms in 1942 and 1989). Which confirms the parent's main point: that backup tech (like sextants) is really a necessity when lives are at stake, simply on the basis of solar flares.
Obviously, backup tech is also needed to cover everyday problems like systems breakdowns while at sea.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I don't drive, but I do cycle most journeys of under an hour.
I live in London. If you follow the road signs (the ones for cars) on a bicycle you'll travel a lot further than you need to in most cases, and be using the busy main roads and junctions, which are the least pleasant to cycle on (except at 4am on a Sunday). It's better following the cycle route signs, but they try and avoid large roads, so the route still isn't as direct as it could be.
If I have time I have a look at a map (one with the cycle routes marked, as they're free), and plan a route like "follow the cycle route signs towards Westminster, until I get to King's Road since it goes too far out of the way then, but rejoin it after the park".
Every time I go somewhere new (or somewhere I've not been often) I pick up some extra local knowledge, like noticing I'm going across a street I recognise the name of, or seeing that going the wrong way down a one-way street (ahem) would have saved a large detour.
I lead a motorcycle group of over 450 people. We ride our motorcycles all over the area surrounding Phoenix, Az. I personally put between 15,000 and 20,000 miles on my bike every year.
I started to use a GPS on our trips because when you need to get 30 bikes ready for a left turn, it's nice to know it's two miles ahead instead of waiting for the sign to show up. Plus, it's really hard to read a map while you riding a motorcycle, the wind tends to move it all around unless you use a tank bag.
I moved to Phoenix 6 years ago, and can now ride my motorcycle anywhere in this beautiful state or the Phoenix metro area without a map or GPS. The GPS and the mapping software on my PC have helped me to design routes much easier than I could have with a map. I can use Google maps to get a satellite view of roads and determine if they are dirt or not.
These tools have helped improve my local knowledge, not lessen it.
My wife has similar experience in her car. Her GPS has given her the confidence to go into areas in Phoenix with the knowledge that she will be able to get there safely. With that experience, she has gained a better understanding of the Phoenix area.
The above notes, while anecdotal, indicate that for some people, the GPS helps them learn the area.
Maybe it's all about how smart or observant the person using it is to begin with. Smart people learn faster without effort, and observant people notice their surroundings without having to work at it. I've always been good at finding my way back to a place after I've been there once or twice, even if someone else was driving. So maybe I'm just naturally more observant that those that don't learn their local area when using a GPS.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.