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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.
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.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
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.
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...
*dons tinfoil hat and tinfoil accessories*
Amahgawd! mapmakers and backseat navigators of the world unite and sue these sat-nav people!
It's just like the buggy coach whip makers!
sat-nav makes it safer to be on the road, now all those idiots driving with a 4' by 4' map over the stearingwheel can actually see where they're going. (that is, if they would stop txting while driving)
I'm sorry to say, i really don't feel my masculinity threatened in any way by a female voice telling me when to turn.
It does, however, alliviate some of the stress of urban driving in cities i don't know.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
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!
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.
another annoying, pointless "skill" is being killed off by progress. boo hoo.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
One good solar flare and no GPS and VHF for a while. Did you realise that? Solar storms in the past have gone on for days, which is a long time to be without navigational aids. Your hurrahing for technology is misplaced. Yes I have GPS, yes I keep conventional maps and compass in the car as a backup. I've known too many people drive around London for ages because they were in an urban canyon and the GPS could not distinguish parallel streets. Our problem around here is Bulgarian and Polish drivers who use car GPS until they find themselves as a T-junction too small for their Actic (semi) to get round, unable to reverse, and have to pay a local farmer to drag out their trailer with a tractor. Great fun unless they're blocking your way home.
(As for "taking pictures will steal souls", can I just point you at the late Michael Jackson, an obvious case of the phenomenon? I think it was Terry Pratchett who observed something like "the idea that taking pictures steals souls is held only by primitive tribes and advanced psychologists".)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That's why they are popular. It's also possible to update a Satnav with new data if roads change, or new ones are built. Most people's car-atlases are obsolete if more than a few years old - meaning we have to replace them regularly to keep up-to-date. While the cost is small, it adds up with a new atlas every couple of years.
The biggest problem with using a map is knowing where you are starting from. It does have a larger "page" than a Satnav screen, which means you get more context at once, but if you are lost it's impossible to work out how to get to where you want to be - as you don't know where you are to start with. Similarly, if you're alone in a car, probably the single most dangerous thing you can possibly do while driving is keep looking down to refer to a map on your lap, while trying not to shunt the vehicle in front if it slows down.
The point in the article about men disliking taking instructions from a woman's voice shows how out of touch the writer is (and therefore how completely lacking in credibility the whole article is). If you don't like one vioce CHANGE IT. If your budget Satnav only comes with one vioce BUY ANOTHER if it annoys you that much. So far as comparing map-reading with calligraphy or thatching - this is completely spurious: almost no-one in past eras could do either of these crafts, just like very few people have ever really had the skill to read a map (Question: do you know how to tell which way a river flows, by looking at the direction of the contours? Congratulations, you're in the top 1%)
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It isn't going to get rid of maps, it'll just make it such that most people don't own them. There are still plenty of uses for maps like, say, loading in to GPS units. Also there are all kinds of maps out there for special things: topographic maps, boundary maps, right of way maps, etc. These are not going away.
Basically, USGS is not going to suddenly say "Oh well, people have GPS now so let's just close up shop." Nope, we'll continue to have highly detailed maps of all kinds. GPS just allows us to use them easier. Take a computer, load all the maps up, and then it can give you an overlay for whatever kind you want at your location.
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.
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.
Deleted
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.
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.
I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I'd partially deaf to bullshit.
Contrary to popular belief, it takes quite a lot to interfere with telecommunications. Not only do geomagnetic storms NOT last days (that'd be a ridiculous amount of energy output, and a days long continuous geomagnetic storm has NEVER been recorded), but severe ones powerful enough to interfere with equipment for more than a handful of minutes recur on the order of once every few decades.
Severe storms, large enough to disrupt half the planet, like the Carrington Event, occur roughly every 500 years, the last one being about 150 years ago, but believe me, if one of those hit us, your GPS would be the least of your concerns. The Carrington Event reportedly lit up the sky at night when the solar wind hit the Earth's magnetosphere, causing aurora as far south as Hawaii, and disrupting telegraph communication over half the world. Nowadays, it'd cause electrical fires all over the place by overloading power lines and blocking pretty much all forms of telecommunication. And bear in mind, this, the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, barely lasted a single day.
If you only bought one today, you are still way ahead of the curve.
Try spending a week driving in Italy with a broken sat-nav with a van full of in-laws flown in from all corners of the world, in particular try it when your *not* italian like me! The funny thing was that I never needed the thing, I mean seriously how many signs pointing to Rome do you need to see on the Motorway to know your on the right track?
Well having said that, on my previous trips to Italy when using a sat-nav on no less than two occasions the sat nav directed us onto a half constructed road! And I kid you not, one of those occasions the sat nav insisted that my fiancee and I drive off the edge of a half constructed bridge!!! It was the on-ramp to the motorway under construction!
This was Italy so that kind of thing apparently happens often, oh and before you ask there were none of the usually expected signs indicating that the road you are turning onto doesn't actually expect prior to the half built bridge!
The moral of the story is the usual rule of thumb with any system - garbage in garbage out, don't put all your faith in a machine!
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
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.
I don't actually agree because at what point do you stop learning "lower level foundations".
So say you use a GPS do you need to read maps? And if you need to read maps, don't you need to understand north, south, east, west? And if you need to understand NSEW do you need to understand a compass? And if you need to understand a compass do you need to understand longitude and latitude? And if you need to understand longitude and latitude what about true north and compass north? And what about...
What did you want to do? Oh yeah go from point A to point B! The problem I have with this lower level foundations is that they are completely irrelevant if you don't need to use them. After all the point of the argument is to go point A to point B. If you were creating the maps in the first place then well yes you need to know all of that stuff.
When I see Joel's illustration of string and strcat I just smile and think wow reminds of that old man saying, "why when I was your age I was walking through the snow and it was -150"
Again not to say that some people don't need to learn it, it all depends on what your day job is.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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
It's more than just the back streets. I often notice LOTS of fascinating details on local maps (such as the high-res ordnance survey maps) that simply aren't included in the likes of Google Maps, Microsoft's Live Virtual Earth Whatever, etc. Mapquest (or was it multimap) used to provide these, but when google earth and all came along, they switched to Live to compete, and lost all the details that made me use them.
There's a basic example of what I'm talking about here:
http://www.keith-dufftown-railway.co.uk/maps/Map3.gif
Note the names of hills, local areas, quarries, etc. Often these local names are what give rise to street names and town names. More importantly, stuff like ancient pagan sites and ancient burial grounds --- the fascinating rich places of history and legend --- are often included.
The world will definitely be a colder place if these are lost in favour of being able to zoom in from a globe to pixelated overhead photos of cows, and low-res DEMs instead of intricate contour lines.
Ummm, no, sorry, I don't work in quant, nice failure at assuming while discussing assumptions though.
And the reason we know the frequency of major geomagnetic storms is because of ice core samples whose stratified layers can yield details about Earth's atmosphere going back thousands of years. And unlike you, I don't get my info from a site that looks like something geocities vomited up.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bracing-for-a-solar-superstorm
And I picture you as someone too lazy to do any actual research into a subject before making unfounded assumptions, especially since even a 5 second Google search yields more credible sources than yours, which contradicts most of your post, as I've explained. I'm sure I certainly wouldn't want to hire you to help me with anything relating to EMC if you do business the same way you post on Slashdot.
But Google maps sure as hell increased my local knowledge. I like staring at maps. I like to pick a spot, and go there by bike.
I could see that a sat-nav on a bike will make one more courageous to explore the local area... and if you're one of those polluting road-jamming filthy bastards, you might explore the region by car...
If you look at it like that, sat-nav increases local knowledge. :D
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 bought a gps to get from Ottawa to Disney World. Got me there alright except the gps guided us to the staff's entrance and not the general public entrance. The man at the gate was wonderful and gave us pins, a bit of fairy dust a local map and then he sent us on our way. We ended-up with free parking on top of that. The lesson I guess is that sometimes it pays to get lost.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
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.
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.
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.
I am where my gps told me to be
Then expect some surprises if you drive in the Alps (or the Rockies) in winter, with a GPS that tells you to go through closed off mountain passes. I hope you have good footwear, warm clothing and a week worth of food as you start to walk back from a stuck car...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
This still seems to be more the drivers' faults than the sat-nav. It's just a tool that should in no way be a substitute for paying attention to the road, the surroundings, the street names, or house numbers. This is like blaming the Internet for spam, viruses, or malware. It's not the tool/device's fault, but the tools that use them.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
I wonder how many more stories like this we'll see once sat-nav becomes something that almost everyone uses. For now, most people who have it don't have it on for most of their trips, but many people who "grow up with it" eventually will. This means that the magic voice will have incredible power in shaping urban traffic patterns. Some roads will be jammed while others will be empty, and all because of sat-nav. I wonder if cities will start adapting to sat-nav by widening the streets that (say) Gramin likes to recommend.
I can imagine a scene in a future movie where some old coot gives the protagonist a ride without nav-sat through the city - taking shortcuts, avoiding lights, dodging jams, and revealing hitherto unseen, decaying, abandoned-looking streets. The protagonist gets to his destination in half the normal time, but still thinks the old man is nutty for his luddite refusal to do things the easy way.
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.
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I know there are motorcyclists out there that ride dangerously, but you have to admit the GP is correct - plenty of people out there drive badly, and it's not vehicle-specific. If you don't believe that, then you're probably part of the problem.
To the GP - they aren't trying to kill motorcyclists specifically; they're trying to kill EVERYONE.
I live in zone 3 and work in zone 4, so I haven't gone into central London at rush hour very often. I think it's fine -- nicer for cycling than most other cities in Britain. You'll have company anyway, apparently British bike stores are really struggling to keep up with demand this summer.
So far this year, I think all the cyclists that have been killed in London have been undertaking lorries that were turning left. Be sensible, alert and assertive and you'll be fine, even on the busy roads. The book CycleCraft has some useful guidance, but it comes down to:
- don't undertake lorries or buses (unless they're stationary and you're sure they won't move before you get past)
- don't ride in the gutter as cars will squeeze past and you'll hit drain covers. Ride close to where a car's left wheels travel ("secondary position"). Ride in the centre of your lane ("primary position") if you don't want cars to try and overtake, e.g. on narrow roads or approaching junctions with filter lanes.
It's easy enough to avoid the heavy traffic by taking back streets, cycle paths and parks. I take the back streets from my flat to the South Circular (cars don't have this option, as there's a "dead end" with a gap for bikes to get through in the middle). I go along the Souch Circ for 800m, then take back streets to the Thames Path (another 2 barriers means cars don't use this route much) which gets me almost to work. It's slightly quicker to take an A road more of the way (and I sometimes do, if it's raining and the Thames Path will be muddy) but, well, people cycle along the Thames for leisure, and for the sake of one minute I can take it every day to work :-)
Order the free TFL maps for the areas you need (link in my previous post). You can then look for a route using quieter roads, which are highlighted, along with routes through parks and along canals. For instance, the "car route" from Holborn station to Waterloo station is down Kingsway, round Aldwych then Strand, across Waterloo Bridge and around the big roundabout. Cycling, the nicer route (similar distance) is along Great Queen Street/Long Acre, down Bow Street/Wellington Street (and through the no-cars bollards), across Waterloo Bridge (in the wide bus lane), and then onto the car-free bit around the Royal Festival Hall to the station.
Good luck :)
"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?