Tag: Google Earth

The Paris Review: ‘Sin Entered the Map’

In The Paris Review, Avi Steinberg considers the messy complications of Google Street View—a map that shows us so much more than lines on a grid. Money quote:

A person seeking directions to Starbucks generally does not want to be told to “take a left at the homeless child.” To truly use the country as its own map, it turns out, involves weaving discomfiting images of the country directly into the fabric of the map. The result is not a tidy diagram of the world abstracted onto a blank slab—as nearly all maps since Mesopotamia have been—but rather a patchwork that chronicles, among many other things, the troubling process by which the map was composed.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)


Virtual Travel: Is There More to it Than ‘Staring at Our Own Roofs’?

In the Independent, Clare Rudebeck takes a look at how far “virtual travel” options have come since we all first used Google Earth to check out our own homes a few years back—and ponders their limitations, too.

“In the last two months, technology titans from Google to IBM have put in a concerted effort to convince us that there is more to virtual travel than staring at our own roofs. And they’re spending a lot of money in the attempt,” she writes. “...but can exploring the virtual world really give us the same sense of wonder, fulfilment and utter exasperation that real tourism delivers? What is travel without lost baggage, stomach bugs and hours spent trying to work out how to use your camera?”


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