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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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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...
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!
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.
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.
You know, as much as I love a good ragging on TV, and as much as I hate the use of video valium for babysitting, this isn't really a new problem at all. I had to learn a lot of my community from scratch when I learned to drive because I used to read in the car.
But I wouldn't call any parent that got their kids to read a lot a bad one, would you?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why did you even look at the signs, after all, All Roads Lead to Rome :)
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.
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.