Maps in the Age of Digital Reproduction

There are few surviving maps from antiquity; one of the most famous classical maps was described by Ptolemy in his Cosmographia, but the actual map itself no longer existed by the time the written work was revived. The pool of accessible maps becomes significant only when we look to medieval times. The advent of the printing press and the paired increase in literacy caused an explosion in maps, which became widely-distributed commodities.

There were, broadly speaking, two other major shifts in the paradigm of maps. After the era of European mercantile expansion came that of the modern state and espionage. Certain maps were now private, protected informational documents conferring advantage on their owners. The final shift was, parallel to the explosion of printed map accessibility, that of the digital map.

The advent of GPS and the infinity of information offered by digital maps has radically transformed our relationship with the world we traverse. The very act of wandering becomes a choice when your phone can frictionlessly provide a full schematic of your city, complete with satellite imagery and an ordered list of places to stop for coffee or a quick shit.

In Jorge Luis Borges’ one-paragraph short story Del Rigor de la Ciencia, the pursuit of perfect cartography leads, absurdly, to a map of equivalent size to the territory it describes. Perfect precision required a perfect replica. The existence of such a map, though, is no longer absurd: we carry such maps every day inside of whichever mapping applications come preloaded on our smartphones. The world has collapsed into the space of our pockets.

The “pristine myth,” or a belief in wilderness untouched by human inhabitants, was a construction that allowed settlers to comfortably colonize lands that were inhabited by groups of people well prior. Although this myth acted and still acts to aid settler-colonialism, the construct of the untouched, uncharted, unmapped area has broader human appeal too. There is something comforting in that which exists beyond our periphery. To chart everything is to admit that nothing is left to be known, and so to make the world uncomfortably small.

Pre-digital maps reflect choices to include and exclude and hence were (are?) cultural documents. London’s Tube map, for example, has evolved with physical constructions to the subway system.

But Google Maps does not present as a human document: it presents as a frictionless depiction of what is, in its entirety. You need only pinch and zoom to morph the plain label SAN FRANCISCO into a 3D reproduction of the skyline. You can literally zoom into the road on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ 1998 Extended Mind paper broadly argues that external devices we use to do our cognitive tasks are actually part of our minds. Their physical presence outside of our heads doesn’t change their functionality, which is identical to the purpose and function of our brains—what’s the difference between my multiplying 54x32 and retrieving the result from my stored data, as opposed to outsourcing the labor to a calculator? In either case, the paper argues, this action is part of the cognitive process of your mind. Regardless of your stance on the meaning of “your” mind, it’s clear that the information held by the objects we use most frequently is a key part of our regular cognition, and perhaps, therefore, our identities.

The type of map that applications initially mimicked, the handheld navigational map, still required work to be done on the part of the user in the form of identifying a route and delineating steps. Digital map applications take on this entire cognitive load for us. As they hold more and more of that load, and with the hyper-detailed “canon” Google Map always available, every other map becomes extraneous - a work of art.

Further, they leave nothing to discover, no privileged information for residents of an area. Previously privileged information, attained through the labor and circumstance of exploration—exploration that brings you, inevitably and inconveniently, in contact with others— requires no work to access. Your Google/Apple map bears no human fingerprint and yet appears to depict exactly what is.

The territory Palestine has never been labeled on Google Maps in the United States. Such erasures by omission on canonized digital maps, the maps that purport to show everything that exists, have the potential to singlehandedly remove territories from the public consciousness.

Midway through Del Rigor de La Ciencia, which is referenced by Jean Baudrillard in the opening lines of Simulacra and Simulation, the map overlays the territory it exactly maps; the image becomes the thing.

I worry that this is the process that is beginning now, as digital maps tell us what exists and where to go. However, the land, culture, and peoples rooted to the ground have not yet been displaced. We can still, for now, wander. The people of Palestine still fight for their name. At the end of the Borges story, the map starts to decay from disuse, and features of the Earth poke out underneath. The real might win it after all.