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.'"

Comments

Re:speed dial

[gbjbaanb]

if our satnav breaks we will use google maps on a smart phone.... in the long run its just no big deal.

I don't know about you, but just talking on your phone whilst driving is considered dangerous.

by the way...how do you know the periodicity?

[Kupfernigk]

Out of curiosity, how do you know severe solar storms recur roughly every 500 years? You would need to show that there were reliable records going back a couple of thousand years. Since the Carrington Event was the first such storm where there was enough electrical equipment in the world to notice the effects, any previous records must be speculative.

I think the truth is that we don't know enough about the Sun to be sure of anything it might do, certainly not to be able to date future events with the predictability you suppose. Looking at your previous posts, you seem to be in some sort of IT support role. I have to say that I wouldn't put someone like you in charge of the disaster recovery program! Like the quants in the City - possibly, from your comments, where you work - you seem to underestimate the importance of the possible size of the downsides in the long tail. I, on the other hand, have actually worked in the EMC/lightning protection area, and all I can say is, I'm not as optimistic as you are.

Re:Road signs

[LordKaT]

Well, if you'd operate your motor vehicles legally, as opposed to sneaking up beside a car on the right, then trying to get past that car after the light turns red, I wouldn't try to make that "sudden right."

Re:speed dial

[Hognoxious]

Y is a vowel in Welsh. Perhaps you should get your facts right before showing your ignorance, boyo.