Mapping Hacks

I wrote an article as part of a “Neogeography” special feature for Geoconnexions Magazine last spring, and ran way over the word count. The spirit of which is in this paragraph,

A distinction between “professional” and “amateur” is not so important…
As in politics, “the new” and “the old” are marketed at the expense of one another - change versus experience, renewal versus reliability. The more different the new is, the easier it is to distinguish 2.0 from 1.0, the easier it is to sell upgrades.

The following is the notes that were left after the word limit:

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For Tim and his Valley friends, everything was going soft.

For the neomapmakers, selection by software made no sense - only pure data was there to be reused.

Participants don’t see themselves as numbered in a mob any more than anyone sees themselves as a blinded participant in mass culture.

Is the best promise we’ve got that it will be the same thing, but it will take longer, and the end results will be free?

Internet applications allowed users to collaborate on map data in …
but were they really producing anything something “new”?

Maps were programmable pictures, interfaces in themselves.

A quarrel started then, rather than stopping, between GIS specialists and the “locative media” newcomers - to use the modern slang, the “paleotards” and the “neotards”. One could see this quarrel, too, echoed in the broader cultural context - the bloggers and their nemesis the “MSM” and its cadre of journalists.

The problem with being too professionalised, too specialised, is that you’re too likely to see what you expect, to the exclusion of other goings-on.
“creativity in asking the right questions”

Yet every bit of good work isn’t done by a smart mob but by a souped up clique.

A wrapper around many different kind of functions. Once you learn one it becomes easier to learn another with a similar interface and that is what turns people into specalists. But then everything starts to look the same. One catches everythingism. Everything, everywhere. With the web everywhere, everyone is infected with everythingism.

Which in practical terms means not stopping people from communicating by propping up language barriers by embedding language too firmly in tools. Less of the browser, more of real things and the ability to translate back and forth between digital and physical representations of things, or between one medium and another. A focus on hardware allows us to retreat from problem-solving but is seldom effective - remember all that 3G consumer-facing LBS? No? It didn’t take off not because the time wasn’t right but because the model was wrong.

This isn’t the Internet of Things, because these aren’t new things. We are in an atmosphere of economic contraction - of “decroissance”, as they say on the Continent - and budget for technology purchase and development will be scarcer.

As “the rising tide raises all boats”, all should benefit from an expansion of interest and investment in geographic information.

Given knowledge of one tool, another with a similar interface becomes easy to learn, and this is what turns people into specialists. But then everything starts to look the same. With the web everywhere, one becomes infected with everythingism.

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