<nettime> Life on Autopilot?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Orit Halpern's book, Beautiful Data, suggests that we live not so much 
in worlds of pure simulation a la Jean Baudrillard (or Philip K. Dick), 
but instead, in a fascinated relation with flows of signals whose 
referential nature does not stop them from forming a "new landscape" for 
the viewer/user. In other words, the data is ostensibly about the world, 
but it upstages that world, becoming the primary object with which we 
interact (and thereby impoverishing the rest of experience). Something 
similar is suggested by Karin Knorr Cetina with her notion of 
"postsocial relations" carried on with the always-unfolding temporal 
objects that typically appear on screens, notably in the realm of 
finance. The stream of flow-objects constitutes a world, one you can 
dive into, wrestle with, and from which - in the case of financial 
traders - you dream of emerging victorious.
Both these theories have a lot to say about the consumer-oriented GPS 
navigation systems discussed in the New York Times piece below. I'd 
argue that these systems arose as a pragmatic answer to the crisis of 
cognitive mapping brought on by capitalist globalization. Confused about 
the sprawling labyrinth that used to be your home town - or maybe, about 
the gleaming new metropolis where you've had to seek another life? No 
problem, just type in the destination and hit the button. Now the 
street, and indeed the city itself, become secondary reflections of the 
one true path streaming in over the phone. Everyone loves satellite 
mapping, yours truly included, but the ambivalence attaching to all 
dominant social functions can easily take over, indeed it already has. 
Life on autopilot is the condition where data takes the wheel, 
navigating your pathway through a stream of signals from which you never 
emerge.
Here's a thought: Kybernetes, the cybernetic steersman, is the new, far 
more sophisticated figure replacing the dreamworld that Guy Debord used 
to call "the spectacle."
BH

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Ignore the GPS. That Ocean Is Not a Road.
Greg Milner

Earlier this month, Noel Santillan, an American tourist in Iceland, 
directed the GPS unit in his rental car to guide him from Keflavik 
International Airport to a hotel in nearby Reykjavik. Many hours and 
more than 250 icy miles later, he pulled over in Siglufjordur, a fishing 
village on the outskirts of the Arctic Circle. Mr. Santillan, a 
28-year-old retail marketer from New Jersey, became an unlikely 
celebrity after Icelandic news media trumpeted his accidental excursion.
Mr. Santillan shouldn't be blamed for following directions. Siglufjordur 
has a road called Laugarvegur, the word Mr. Santillan -- accurately 
copying the spelling from his hotel booking confirmation -- entered in 
lieu of Laugavegur, a major thoroughfare in Reykjavik. The real mystery 
is why he persisted, ignoring road signs indicating that he was driving 
away from Iceland's capital. According to this newspaper, Mr. Santillan 
apparently explained that he was very tired after his flight and had 
"put his faith in the GPS."
Faith is a concept that often enters the accounts of GPS-induced 
mishaps. "It kept saying it would navigate us a road," said a Japanese 
tourist in Australia who, while attempting to reach North Stradbroke 
Island, drove into the Pacific Ocean. A man in West Yorkshire, England, 
who took his BMW off-road and nearly over a cliff, told authorities that 
his GPS "kept insisting the path was a road." In perhaps the most 
infamous incident, a woman in Belgium asked GPS to take her to a 
destination less than two hours away. Two days later, she turned up in 
Croatia.
These episodes naturally inspire incredulity, if not outright mockery. 
After a couple of Swedes mistakenly followed their GPS to the city of 
Carpi (when they meant to visit Capri), an Italian tourism official 
dryly noted to the BBC that "Capri is an island. They did not even 
wonder why they didn't cross any bridge or take any boat." An Upper West 
Side blogger's account of the man who interpreted "turn here" to mean 
onto a stairway in Riverside Park was headlined "GPS, Brain Fail Driver."
But some end tragically -- like the tale of the couple who ignored "Road 
Closed" signs and plunged off a bridge in Indiana last year. Disastrous 
incidents involving drivers following disused roads and disappearing 
into remote areas of Death Valley in California became so common that 
park rangers gave them a name: "death by GPS." Last October, a tourist 
was shot to death in Brazil after GPS led her and her husband down the 
wrong street and into a notorious drug area.
If we're being honest, it's not that hard to imagine doing something 
similar ourselves. Most of us use GPS as a crutch while driving through 
unfamiliar terrain, tuning out and letting that soothing voice do the 
dirty work of navigating. Since the explosive rise of in-car navigation 
systems around 10 years ago, several studies have demonstrated 
empirically what we already know instinctively. Cornell researchers who 
analyzed the behavior of drivers using GPS found drivers "detached" from 
the "environments that surround them." Their conclusion: "GPS eliminated 
much of the need to pay attention."
As a driving tool, GPS is not so much a new technology as it is an 
apotheosis. For almost as long as automobiles have existed, people have 
tried to develop auto-navigation technologies. In the early 20th 
century, products like the Jones Live-Map Meter and the Chadwick Road 
Guide used complex mechanical systems connected to a car's wheels or 
odometer to provide specialized directions. In the 1960s and '70s, Japan 
and the United States experimented with networks of beacons attached to 
centralized computers that let drivers transmit their route and receive 
route information.
We seem driven (so to speak) to transform cars, conveyances that show us 
the world, into machines that also see the world for us.
A consequence is a possible diminution of our "cognitive map," a term 
introduced in 1948 by the psychologist Edward Tolman of the University 
of California, Berkeley. In a groundbreaking paper, Dr. Tolman analyzed 
several laboratory experiments involving rats and mazes. He argued that 
rats had the ability to develop not only cognitive "strip maps" -- 
simple conceptions of the spatial relationship between two points -- but 
also more comprehensive cognitive maps that encompassed the entire maze.
Could society's embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps? For Julia 
Frankenstein, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg's Center for 
Cognitive Science, the danger of GPS is that "we are not forced to 
remember or process the information -- as it is permanently ‘at hand,' 
we need not think or decide for ourselves." She has written that we "see 
the way from A to Z, but we don't see the landmarks along the way." In 
this sense, "developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is 
a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes." GPS 
abets a strip-map level of orientation with the world.
There is evidence that one's cognitive map can deteriorate. A widely 
reported study published in 2006 demonstrated that the brains of London 
taxi drivers have larger than average amounts of gray matter in the area 
responsible for complex spatial relations. Brain scans of retired taxi 
drivers suggested that the volume of gray matter in those areas also 
decreases when that part of the brain is no longer being used as 
frequently. "I think it's possible that if you went to someone doing a 
lot of active navigation, but just relying on GPS," Hugo Spiers, one of 
the authors of the taxi study, hypothesized to me, "you'd actually get a 
reduction in that area."
For Dr. Tolman, the cognitive map was a fluid metaphor with myriad 
applications. He identified with his rats. Like them, a scientist runs 
the maze, turning strip maps into comprehensive maps -- increasingly 
accurate models of the "great God-given maze which is our human world," 
as he put it. The countless examples of "displaced aggression" he saw in 
that maze -- "the poor Southern whites, who take it out on the Negros," 
"we psychologists who criticize all other departments," "Americans who 
criticize the Russians and the Russians who criticize us" -- were all, 
to some degree, examples of strip-map comprehension, a blinkered view 
that failed to comprehend the big picture. "What in the name of Heaven 
and Psychology can we do about it?" he wrote. "My only answer is to 
preach again the virtues of reason -- of, that is, broad cognitive maps."
GPS is just one more way for us strip-map the world, receding into our 
automotive cocoons as we run the maze. Maybe we should be grateful when, 
now and then, they give us a broader view of it -- even if by accident. 
Mr. Santillan's response to his misbegotten journey was the right one. 
When he reached Siglufjordur, he exited his car, marveled at the scenery 
and decided to stay awhile. Reykjavik could wait.
****

Greg Milner is the author of the forthcoming book "Pinpoint: How GPS Is 
Changing Technology, Culture and Our Minds."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/ignore-the-gps-that-ocean-is-not-a-road.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

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