The applications of the Peters projection throw into stark relief the fact that, ever since Ptolemy, individuals and organizations have used world maps for their own symbolic and political ends, regardless of the cartographer’s claims to comprehensiveness and objectivity. Such claims have also been subject to appropriation, and used to further the ideological agenda of the map’s users, rather than representing an end in their own right. Although modern cartographers may have a better understanding of the mathematical impossibility of comprehensively projecting the globe onto a flat map, such knowledge continues to make little difference to how people understand and use world maps today.
• • •
The release of the Peters projection in 1973 sparked a controversy within the world of cartography that reached far beyond the map’s purported accuracy. The projection was questionably executed, its claims to accuracy and objectivity were wildly exaggerated, the championing of ‘Third World’ countries laudable in many ways but ultimately limited, and its attack on Mercator’s projection clumsy and misguided. But Peters captured a perceptible shift in Western intellectual culture’s understanding of mapmaking, the realization that all maps of the world are inevitably selective, partial representations of the territory they claim to represent, and that such representations are always subject to personal prejudice and political manipulation. The eighteenth-century belief in the ability of mapmaking to offer transparent, rational and scientifically objective images of the world, exemplified by the Cassini surveys, had slowly unravelled from the late nineteenth century onwards, as the political dictates of nationalism, imperialism and a range of ideologies appropriated cartography to produce persuasive but selective maps designed to legitimate their particular political versions of the world. Once dissident thinkers and political activists began to question such maps, it was almost inevitable that a figure like Peters would challenge the established cartographic hegemony. The resulting controversy unwittingly revealed the terminal limits of traditional world mapping and took cartography right to the brink of its next great evolution: the virtual world of online mapping.
Today, the Peters projection is no longer used, but the thematic sections in the Peters Atlas of the World (1989) which addressed social and economic issues such as population, economic growth and social issues have been absorbed into most early twenty-first century atlases. In the provocatively entitled Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live (2008), Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford dispensed altogether with maps according to physical size, and produced 366 world maps drawn according to demographic issues ranging from population growth to military spending, immigration, infant mortality, endangered species, and deaths from war. Their Atlas uses computer software to represent statistical data according to its geographical distribution on a world map. The cartogram of the world’s population in 1500, for example, shows the relative insignificance of the Americas. These cartograms represent many of the issues of today’s global world – population, environmentalism, poverty, inequality and conflict – but not one of them attempts to show the world according to either equal area or conformal principles.
The problem with Peters’s world map lay not in his technical limitations in drawing a map, but in persisting with the belief that it was still possible to create a more ‘accurate’ and scientifically objective map of the world. Having convincingly argued that the history of cartography has always explicitly or implicitly reproduced the prevailing cultural values of its time, Peters still clung to the Enlightenment belief that his own world map could transcend such conditions, and be truly objective. In being so wrong, both technically and intellectually, Peters and the controversy that surrounded his projection inadvertently illustrated a deeper truth about mapping the world, that any map of the world is always partial and inherently selective, and that as a result it is inevitably prey to political appropriation. Cartography is still digesting these lessons, not in spite of Arno Peters, but to some extent because of him.
12
Information
Google Earth, 2012
Virtual Orbital Space, 11,000 kilometres above the earth’s surface, 2012
From 11,000 kilometres above its surface, the planet earth spins into view out of the black void of deep space. The sun’s rays illuminate its surface, which appears free of clouds and water, although its ocean floors still sparkle ultramarine blue, the continents a beguiling patchwork of greens, browns and pinks. North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and central Asia curve round in a crescent through the right-hand half of the globe. The Atlantic Ocean dominates the bottom left, giving way to the tip of North America, with the brilliant white sheet of Greenland nearly crowning the planet’s apex, looming over the North Pole. This is a vision of the world as Plato imagined it nearly two and a half thousand years ago in the Phaedo, a gleaming, perfect sphere, ‘marvellous for its beauty’. It is the that Ptolemy projected on his geometrical grid in the second century AD, the globe that Mercator plotted onto a rectangle nearly 500 years ago, and the earth that NASA captured in the first extraterrestrial photograph of the whole planet taken in the last decades of the twentieth century. This is the geographer’s ultimate object of study, an image of the whole earth.
But this is not an omniscient fantasy of the earth imagined from some god-like perspective. It is an image of the earth as seen from the home page of Google Earth.1 Launched in 2005, the application, alongside Google’s Maps, is now the world’s most popular geospatial application (a combination of geographical data and computer software). In April 2009 Google edged past its mail rival MapQuest.com with just under 40 per cent of the market share of online visits to mapping websites.2 Since then its share of the market has continued to grow, and, despite efforts by other rivals such as Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft’s Bing Maps, it is now virtually synonymous with online mapping. By November 2011 Google’s market share in the United States was over 65 per cent, with Yahoo! its nearest rival trailing way behind with just 15 per cent.3 Globally, Google’s dominance is even more pronounced, with its share of the global online search market at around 70 per cent.4 Of an estimated 2 billion people currently online globally, more than half a billion have downloaded Google Earth, and the figure continues to rise.
The application’s benefits and subsequent popularity are obvious to anyone who has used it. As well as drawing on the iconic image of the blue planet suspended in space popularized by NASA in the 1970s, Google Earth offers its users a level of interaction with the earth unimaginable on printed paper maps or atlases. The application’s display allows the world to be tilted, panned and rotated; geographical places and physical objects can be clicked to provide more information, and even to introduce time in the form of video streaming; other data can be integrated and ‘layered’ onto its surface, from political boundaries to historical maps depicting the same region; users can zoom down through its layers of data, or enter any location on the planet, and within seconds go from thousands of kilometres above the earth to within a few metres of its surface, presented with photo-real, three-dimensional images of recognizable neighbourhoods, streets, buildings and houses. Because Google Earth’s application programming interfaces (or APIs) are free to anyone with internet access, individuals and companies can now create their own virtual maps within a computer-simulated environment that currently allows them to appropriate Google’s geographical data and repackage it for their own use.5 Not only has Google released a mountain of geographical data online for free; it has endorsed the ways in which its applications have been used by a variety of non-governmental organizations to support a range of environmental campaigns and humanitarian responses to natural catastrophes and civil wars across the globe.
The sheer scale of information that stands behind that first image of the earth is unprecedented, and staggering when compared to that of a traditional paper map. The viewer is looking at an extraordinary ten petabytes of potential geographical information distribut
ed across the globe’s surface. A byte is a unit of data representing a single 8-bit value of data in a computer’s memory; in Western languages, a bit can be used to hold a single alphabetical or numerical character, such as the letter A, or the number 0. A standard 80 gigabyte hard drive contains approximately 80,000,000,000 bytes; one petabyte represents one million gigabytes, with a capacity to store 500 billion pages of printed text. At this size, Google Earth is able to call on a volume of digital data equivalent to six month’s worth of the BBC’s total programming output, any byte of which can be retrieved in seconds as the online viewer enters their coordinates and hurtles down towards the earth. As the image refreshes at up to fifty frames per second (FPS), Google Earth’s technology is able to produce the highest definition of all its online competitors, giving a crisp, flicker-free image that simulates flight, and which has ensured its dominance in the world of online mapping.
In less than a decade, Google Earth has not just set the standard for these applications, but has led to a complete re-evaluation of the status of maps and the future of mapmaking, allowing maps to appear more democratic and participatory than ever before. It seems that anywhere on the earth can potentially now be seen and mapped by anyone online, without the inevitable subjective bias and prejudice of the cartographer. And as the cartographic limits of what it is possible to create online are expanded, so are the definitions of a map and its maker. If we use the established definition of a map as a graphic representation that provides a spatial understanding of the world, many geographers would not categorize Google Earth as a map at all (even its creators are cautious about using the term, preferring ‘geospatial application’ instead). Based on the manipulation of satellite and aerial imagery, the application produces a photographic realism free of the usual graphic signs and symbols that now define modern maps. Its makers are no longer even formally trained in geography or even cartography. The technological breakthroughs that inspired these geospatial applications were made by computer scientists, and those who work in virtual mapping today are usually called ‘geospatial technologists’, rather than ‘cartographers’.
By its supporters, Google and its applications are spoken about with reverential awe. The computer scientist John Hennessy hails Google as ‘the largest computer system of the world’, while David Vise, the author of The Google Story, claims that ‘[n]ot since Gutenberg has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google’.6 Others are not quite so enthusiastic. Some complain that Google’s caching of content as it crawls across the web infringes all manner of copyrights; others (recently vindicated) argue that the company’s ability to save individuals’ search history represents a violation of privacy – a criticism intensified by Google’s Street View initiative, which captures photographic imagery of everyday life. The company has also been attacked by civil liberties groups for censoring content, particularly in cooperation with the Chinese government, although in January 2010 the company took the decision to stop taking down material deemed sensitive by the Chinese. They continue to receive criticism from states such as Iran, North Korea and even India for displaying militarily sensitive locations within its geospatial applications. In December 2005, V. S. Ramamurthy, secretary to India’s federal Department of Science and Technology, worried that Google’s data ‘could severely compromise a country’s security’.7 In most cases surrounding copyright and privacy, Google has successfully fought its case in the US courts. The newly evolving field of ‘spatial law’ is trying to keep up with Google as it releases ever more sophisticated technological applications that test the boundaries of what is legally permissible.8
As a result, many working in academic geography and professional cartography regard Google Earth with suspicion, even alarm. For some it signals the end of the traditional print-based map industry and the death of paper maps. For others it is a retrograde step in the quality of mapmaking: personalized maps made by ‘amateurs’ appear basic and lack the usual protocols of professional verification and review. Google Earth also faces accusations of homogenizing maps by imposing a singular geospatial version of the world in an act of cyber-imperialism.9 Speaking in 2008, the British Cartography Society’s president Mary Spence summarized many of her colleagues’ concerns when she argued that online mapping (and Google Maps in particular) remains some way from matching the detail and comprehensiveness of state-sponsored reference maps like the Ordnance Survey, because it is not designed to represent medium-scale data of the kind seen on traditional reference maps.10 Others question the application’s innovativeness, claiming that Google acts simply as a data aggregator, using relatively basic programming to piece together licensed material from a variety of satellite imagery providers. Google does not reveal fully which companies provide specific data, and this makes it almost impossible to evaluate the quality of the data, or how it has been rendered.11
There is also a paradox that the free circulation of virtual maps and the ability to appropriate them for other uses online is led by some of the wealthiest multinational net-based corporations currently trading on the NASDAQ, many like Google generating vast revenues from advertising and sponsored links on their websites (in the third quarter of 2011 the company’s net income rose 26 per cent to $2.73 billion). It is impossible to predict the future of such applications. Anything approaching a history of them is necessarily still to be written, as the technology continues to evolve on an almost daily basis, but this chapter is the first attempt to provide a printed account of Google Earth and incorporate it within the wider history of mapmaking.12
• • •
Each map in this book has constructed a particular cultural world view as much as it represents one, and nowhere is this process more evident than in the rapidly evolving development of geospatial applications like Google Earth. The application’s ability to draw on ten petabytes of potential geographical data within seconds is just one of the most dramatic manifestations of the current and ongoing transformation in information technology, a change so profound that the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells has called it ‘the beginning of a new age, the Information Age’.13
Writing in 1998, Castells argued that we were experiencing ‘a technological revolution, centred around information’,14 which he calls a networked society, where social behaviour is organized around electronically processed information networks.15 Such a society generates a ‘spirit of informationalism’, where information and its processing become paramount in economic organization. Castells believes that the circuit of instantaneous electronic exchanges – telecommunications, computer processing, microelectronic devices – is creating a new spatial environment, what some commentators are calling ‘DigiPlace’,16 in which networked individuals navigate their way through an apparently endless flow of virtual information. It offers its users the promise of understanding their place in the world by encouraging them to move between spaces that are partly physical, but increasingly virtual, from finding their way around a city to shopping and gaming.17 All of this sounds like the stuff of dystopian science fiction, where the ‘real’ world is replaced by a virtual, digital world. But Castells points out that ‘all reality is virtually perceived’, because we apprehend the world through a variety of signs and symbols. The network society represents a new communication system which generates what Castells calls ‘real virtuality’. This is a system in which ‘reality itself (that is, people’s material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting’, and where ‘appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience’. At the heart of the network society is information. According to James Gleick, ‘information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle’. For modern physicists, the whole universe is now approached as ‘a cosmic information-processing machine’.18 No company better exemplifies the rise of the network society and this ‘spirit of information
alism’ than Google, with its defining mission statement ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’.19 To grasp how applications like Google Earth have changed irrevocably the terms of mapping involves understanding the monumental changes to the theory and practice of communicating information that took place in the second half of the twentieth century.
During the late 1940s a group of American mathematicians and engineers began to develop ways of predicting what they called stochastic processes – events which appear random and indeterminate. Individuals like Norbert Wiener (1896–1964) and Claude Shannon (1916–2001) were employed during the Second World War to work on stochastic problems like firing mechanisms and cryptography. They started to propose complex ‘control systems’ that could decode and predict apparently arbitrary communicative acts between humans – and between machines. In 1948 Wiener wrote that ‘we have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics’, a term taken from the Greek kybernetes, meaning a steersman of a ship, which is also used to define control or governance.20
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 50
