But you don't, of course. What you do – or what I did, anyway, but watch anyone using Google Earth for the first time, and you'll see they do the equivalent – is to hurtle across continents to the semi-detached house on the outskirts of York where you grew up, to peer down at a street you know well. In an era of previously unimagined opportunities for exploring the far-off and strange, we want mainly to stare at ourselves.
It is a testament to the rate of change in the world of mapping, though, that Liquid Galaxy is now essentially old hat. Google has much, much bigger plans. In June it revealed that it had already started using planes – "military-grade spy planes", the New York senator Charles Schumer claimed – to provide more detailed 3D imagery of the world's big cities. It also unveiled the Street View Trekker, a bulky backpack with several 15-megapixel cameras protruding on a stalk, so that operatives can capture "offroad" imagery from hiking trails, narrow alleyways or the forest floor. Almost every month, new kinds of data are incorporated into Google Maps: in June, it was 2,000 miles of British canal towpaths, complete with bridges and locks; it was bike lanes. And for the first time, Google's dominance of digital mapping faces a credible threat: Apple has announced that it will no longer include Google Maps on iPhones or iPads, replacing it with an alternative that, an Apple source told the tech blog All Things D, "will blow your head off".
"I honestly think we're seeing a more profound change, for mapmaking, than the switch from manuscript to print in the Renaissance," says the University of London cartographic historian Jerry Brotton. "That was huge. But this is bigger." The transition to print gave far more people access to maps. The transition to ubiquitous digital mapping accelerates and extends that development – but it is also transforming the roles that maps play in our lives.
The idea of a one-to-one scale map of the world, portraying everything in it, is a venerable device in literature, surfacing most famously in the work of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges; in Harry Potter, there's a map that shows what everyone in Hogwarts is doing at every moment. But in the era of Street View Trekker and Liquid Galaxy, these fictional maps seem somewhat less absurd – and the level of detail is only one way in which maps are changing. Increasingly, the boundary between consulting a map and interacting with the world outside it is blurring: when Google glasses, currently in prototype, can project directions, or reviews of the restaurant you're looking at, directly into your visual field, what does the word "map" mean anymore? While researching his forthcoming book, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Brotton sometimes brought up the "one-to-one map" idea, from Borges and Carroll, with people at Google, but they didn't find it particularly witty or intriguing.
"Oh, yeah," they would reply, matter-of-factly. "We can make that map."
by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian | Read more:
