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google maps ideology

Conceptually, we are building a mirror of the real world. So, anything that you see in the real world needs to be in our database. 1 – Ed Parsons Google geo-spatial technologist

cartography | ambition by sean irwin

earth model dataset street view politics

Google is the current leader in the race to compile a digital version of our planet. Combining GPS data, images from Keyhole spy satellites, topographic information collected by NASA, and countless images captured by Street View cameras Google has nearly realised its quixotic ambition of a complete digital simulacrum of the Earth. It is a tremendously ambitious project; Google’s geo-spatial applications take up 20 petabytes (or 20 000 terabytes) storage. Street View has more than eight million kilometres of imagery stitched together and they are now adding places inaccessible by car, attaching a version of the Street View camera rig to snowmobiles, ATVs and even backpack frames. The Google Art Project allows users to ‘visit’ 150 museums in eight countries – a feature included in the basic Maps interface as of 2014. In 2012 Google started an inventory of our planet’s 400 billion trees. Then there is Google Sky, Google Ocean, Google Moon, Google Mars and Liquid Galaxy. Barton and Barton consider maps the ‘quintessential ideological genre’ 2 Maps appear to be a representation of an area but cartographers must actually decide what to include on the map. The United Kingdom’s Ordnance Survey, founded in 1791, has hundreds of pages of rules for inclusions and exclusions in its so-called Red Book such as ‘outhouses can be included provided they are both permanent and large enough to be shown without distortion’. No map can possibly contain all the available information about the region it depicts – the plat would be illegible. Google attempts to resolve this problem with Layers that can be turned on and off. However, with all the layers ‘on’, the map is useless. Barton and Barton identify three criteria for determining whether a map qualifies as an ideological document: it must present (or privilege) a specific point of view, it must disguise the fact of this privileging, and it must present its ideology as natural or non-ideological. Barton and Barton use the phrase ‘coterminous with reality’ to describe this last qualification; the most effective ideological documents are those that seem to be nothing more than statements of truth (or in the case of maps, depictions of reality). The ideology of maps can be relatively benign – Barthes, agreeing with Gide, described the ideology of the Blue Guide as the Helvetico- Protestant morality that considers mountain climbing a civic virtue and churches the only acceptable tourist destinations. 3 Google’s ideology concerns technology. This should come as no surprise. Specifically, the argument made by Google Earth, Google Maps and Street View is that technology (and digital technology in particular) is commensurate with the natural world. The combination of Google Earth and Street View are like the general and specific arguments for Google’s ideology. Google Earth presents us with, on one hand, the world as it is, and on the other, the world recreated digitally. Google’s efforts to make its Earth more realistic and complete aim at disguising this distinction. Google Earth miniaturises for the sake of utility; Street View, in its entirety, is impossibly huge. Combined, they make the argument that digital technology can recreate our planet in sum and in detail.

Google 2013

The historic centre of Rome as seen in Google Earth with all the available data layers on.

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Google 2014

Prince Edward Viaduct, Toronto. Clement Valla collects images like this one that reveal the limitations of Google’s technologies

1 Reuters TV, Youtube.com , June 29, 2012, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=pAbeCYtUQW8 (accessed January 21, 2014) 2 Ben F Barton and Marthalee S Barton, ‘Ideology and the Map: Toward a Postmodern Visual Design Practice’, in Central Works in Technical Communication , Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A Selber, editors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp 232-252 3 Roland Barthes, ‘The Blue Guide’ in Mythologies , trans. Jonathan Cape Ltd. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. pp 74-77

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