A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Having evolved through seven different versions since its launch in 2005, Google Earth continues to improve its realism and resolution, now at an unparalleled level. In 2008, in an attempt to expand its data, Google extended its commercial agreement with DigitalGlobe, also signing another deal with their rivals GeoEye to use its satellite data with a resolution of just 50 centimetres (the satellites have an even higher resolution of just 41 centimetres, but the licensing terms with the US government forbid its commercial release).58 The rocket used by GeoEye to launch the satellite into orbit even featured Google’s logo. On Google Earth the most recent challenge has been the introduction of 3D terrain modelling. Initially the application effectively showed a satellite image draped on a three-dimensional representation of the landscape, but, as McCracken noticed in 2005, it could not represent features like buildings. The information required digitally to see into the distance when looking at the earth horizontally or from an oblique angle is even more complicated than that needed for the classical aerial perspective looking directly down from above. Google’s solution was to use a technique called ‘ray tracing’, which uses geometry to mimic the human eye. The application identifies the direction the viewer is looking in, and fills that part of the screen first before accessing the surrounding data that defines the eye’s peripheral vision.

  But the recent technical innovations within Google Earth are not the only developments within the company’s plans for its geospatial applications. Michael T. Jones, Google’s current Chief Technology Advocate and co-founder of Keyhole, recently claimed that Google Maps API is now used by more than 350,000 websites across the globe.59 In June 2008 Google launched a new product called Map maker, within its Maps application, that now enables anyone in more than 180 countries to add or edit features such as roads, businesses and schools in their local areas, which are then incorporated into Google Maps. The information submitted is then moderated by other users and checked by Google in a peer-review system that the company claims enables users to make their own maps, while also benefiting from what is effectively free geographical data.

  One important consequence of this initiative is that the dream (or fear) of a universally standardized virtual map of the world will never be realized. Ed Parsons, Google’s geospatial technologist based in London, admits that Google initially held ‘a naive view that we could have one global representation of the world’.60 But once it became clear that national and local users wanted to retain certain ways of representing physical and human geographical features, Google decided to model a basic representation of the earth over which users added their own culturally specific codes and symbols. Critics argue that the Map maker program lacks the professional moderation of an organization like the Ordnance Survey, and that Google is effectively gathering information for free. But there is no doubt that this innovation allows people to make an image of their immediate environments in a way that has no parallel in the history of mapmaking.

  The current excitement about the capabilities offered by Google Earth is understandable. Although the application is still in its relative infancy, with further developments planned for its global coverage and three-dimensional modelling, it is now technologically possible to envisage Borges’s fantasy of the map on a scale of 1:1. Parsons claims that ‘if you talk to most people involved in internet mapping and doing what we do we completely accept the fact that you could build a one to one map’. But unlike the traditional paper map envisaged by Borges, such a virtual map would, Parsons says, operate ‘at multiple levels of reality’. Google are storing different kinds of information that can be retrieved at any moment and layered upon a 1:1 scale geospatial image: data on people’s social networks, capital flows, underground transportation links, and a variety of commercial information, all of which can be called up instantaneously. The world picture of ‘real virtuality’ that Google Earth will soon be able to offer us will be limited only by military and legal constraints: the US military infrastructure still restricts access to satellite imagery of the highest resolution, including commercially available data, and how concerns over personal privacy will play out in the new realm of spatial law remains unknown. At 10 centimetre resolution, satellite imagery can now identify an individual’s face, but until the law establishes whether such data can be made freely available, Google must wait.

  In the meantime, the company continues to develop its geospatial applications alongside its search engine to create what is in effect a gigantic map of the Web. Brin and Page anticipated this development by the early establishment of PageRank, but their embryonic understanding of virtual mapping was very different to traditional definitions of cartography as mapping physical terrain. If the Web is a ‘network of hyperlinked documents accessible via the Internet’,61 then Google is creating an infinite virtual map that attempts to represent an ever-expanding world of information. Google Earth is a compelling adjunct to this process, which allows people to start by looking at physical terrain, and from there drill down through potentially limitless layers of digital information, most of which cannot be ‘seen’ by the human eye. In April 2010 the Earth application became even more central, as Google integrated it into its ‘Maps’ site, allowing users to move seamlessly from one to the other.62 For Google, one justification of its geospatial applications is that the digital image of the earth becomes the medium through which all information is accessed; writing in 2007, Michael T. Jones claimed that Google ‘inverts the roles of Web browser as application and map as content, resulting in an experience where the planet itself is the browser’.63 The Earth application – according to Google – is the first place a viewer goes to access and view information. This seems, for the moment at least, to be a completely pure definition of a world map made up from its own cultural beliefs and assumptions, all of which are now potentially available at the click of a computer mouse.

  The scale of the data that can be uploaded onto the virtual map shows no signs of reaching its limit. In 2010, Ed Parsons estimated that if all the data ever recorded by humanity up to 1997 were digitized, the next thirteen years of Internet usage would double that figure. After that, he predicts it will double again in just eighteen months. Estimates suggest that the Web’s current size is anything up to a staggering 1,800 exabytes (one exabyte contains one quintillion bytes, or 1030), with nearly 12 billion pages.64 But capacity is not the problem. Parsons claims that ‘if every planet had an Internet the size of the current Internet we’d easily fill it’. The challenge, as always in the history of mapmaking, is how to keep up with the accumulation, even overload, of information. Google and its geospatial applications may have the ability to keep pace with this phenomenal increase in data, but to map it will be an ongoing and – as Ptolemy, and the Cassinis discovered – an interminable process.

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  In 1970, the American geographer Waldo Tobler famously invoked what he called ‘the first law of geography: everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’.65 Tobler, an early pioneer of computerized mapmaking, coined his First Law while developing computer-based simulations of population growth in Detroit. With its implications of global interconnectedness and the importance of computer technology in mapping human geography, Tobler’s First Law acts as a metaphor for the Internet, and has become a driving principle for the geospatial technologists at Google Earth. The First Law acknowledges the fact that, since Ptolemy, geography has always been egocentric. Its users begin by finding themselves or their community on a map, but then gradually lose interest in ‘distant things’ on its margins. When they first log on to Google Earth (or any other geospatial application) most people begin by inputting their own location (in terms of a region, city, town or even a street), rather than using the application to expand their geographical knowledge.

  For Google, Tobler’s First Law offers a way of not only mapping the world online, but also of making money from its information. Ed Parsons poin
ts out that ‘for us Google Earth and Google Maps are the visual representation of geography. But geography is buried in almost everything we do, because almost all information has some geographical context to it.’ He estimates that over 30 per cent of all Google searches have some explicit geographical element: Google is effectively organizing information geographically, as well as alphabetically and numerically. Geospatial applications are now firmly embedded in the Google search experience. Any search allows for immediate comparison with its maps application as a way of situating information in space. If I type ‘Chinese restaurants’ into Google, I will be confronted with a list of seven restaurants in my local town, each with a place page alongside a Google map showing me their location. It is an aspect of the company’s investment in these applications that most geographers have failed to notice, as they fixate on the strictly cartographic aspects of Google Earth and Maps. Parsons argues, directly following Tobler, that the increasing mobility of both individuals and their access to geospatial applications (such as via mobile phones) means that information ‘that is close to us is going to be more important than information that is further away’. His example is advertising. If a business can ‘show their advertisements to people within 100 metres of their business who have in the past expressed a preference for buying their sort of goods, that’s a real lead. People would pay good money for that kind of information.’66 A glance at Google’s annual profits suggests that businesses are indeed paying for such information. In the hands of Google, Claude Shannon’s theory of countable information has finally found its market. The faraway is close at hand in virtual images of elsewhere which, for Google, are proving to be extremely profitable.

  Michael T. Jones anticipated Parsons’s point in an interview in May 2006, just a year after Google’s acquisition of Keyhole. Jones argued that

  to say that Google launched Google Earth to not make any money really doesn’t make any sense. Google is a real business that makes profit. Google Earth connects the world with the world’s information in a way that was never before possible and has excited the imagination of tens of millions of people. That’s a good thing for Google. Even if our business model was to attract attention to Google and let people use Google search to pay for it, it’s worked pretty well. So people who feel we went into Google Earth without the intention to make money really don’t understand our business. Our business is not about the GIS components of our work. Those are the tools we use to build our business.67

  The result is a model of e-commerce that economists call ‘Googlenomics’. By 2002, Google had developed a new method of raising revenue by selling online advertising space in ‘what may be the most successful business idea in history’: Adwords.68 Adwords uses a complicated algorithm to analyse every single Google search and determine which advertisers get to display their business on the ‘sponsored links’ found on every results page. Businesses tender sealed bids on how much they are willing to pay Google each time a user clicks on their advertisement, in the world’s biggest and fastest auction. In a fraction of a second Google determines who will offer to pay the most, ranking their adverts on its sponsored links accordingly. Every time anyone searches on Google, they are unwittingly participating in a ceaseless, multi-billion-dollar global auction. Google sells the scheme to advertisers as enabling them to ‘connect with potential customers at the magic moment they’re searching for your products or services, and only pay when people click your ads’.69 It represents what Google’s head of advertising calls ‘the physics of clicks’. The pursuit of profit is simultaneously also a method of acquiring more data. ‘Selling ads’, writes Steven Levy,

  doesn’t generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users’ tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behaviour, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It’s a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google’s future but the future of anyone who does business online.70

  At the centre of Googlenomics are the company’s geospatial applications. As Adwords allows companies to target their advertisements more effectively, so Google Earth and Maps locate their product in both physical and virtual space. The geospatial application has found its definitive use, as Michael T. Jones suggested in a recent lecture during which he grandly announced what he called ‘The new meaning of maps’. Jones defines the online map as ‘a place of business’, an ‘application platform’ from where businesses trade what he calls ‘actionable information’.71 There is clearly an increasingly commercial motivation behind the company’s development of geospatial applications, but neither Jones’s ‘new meaning of maps’ nor their intimate relation to business are quite as new as they would like to think. Google Earth is part of a long and distinguished cartographic tradition of mapping geography onto commerce that stretches right back at least to regional maps of the commodities of the Mediterranean. It underlies the world maps of Ribeiro, driven by access to the commercial wealth of the Indonesian archipelago, Mercator’s projection for navigators, Blaeu’s atlases for the wealthy merchants and burghers of Holland, and even Halford Mackinder’s world map of imperial conflict over increasingly competitive markets. Where maps and their makers are motivated by the apparently disinterested pursuit of geographical information, its acquisition requires patronage, state funding or commercial capital to make it viable. Mapping and money have always gone hand in hand and have reflected the vested interests of particular rulers, states, businesses or multinational corporations, but this does not necessarily negate the innovations made by the mapmakers they have financed.

  But there is a crucial difference between what Google is doing and what went before, which is not simply about scale: it concerns the computerized source code used to build its geospatial applications, as well as Adwords and PageRank, which in principle remains true to Claude Shannon’s basic formulations of how to communicate fungible information. For obvious commercial reasons, Google does not disclose the specific details of its code,72 which means that, for the first time in recorded history, a world view is being constructed according to information which is not publicly and freely available. All prior methods of mapmaking ultimately disclosed their techniques and sources, even if, as in the case of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mapmaking, they tried – but failed – to withhold its detail from their competitors. And even such examples of mapmaking were not exclusively designed to extract financial profit, nor were they built with the sheer scale of data that allows Google to restrict the circulation of its code within the public domain. Google Maps API allows users to reproduce Google’s maps, but not to understand its code; and, like Adwords, by tracking the circulation of its maps, Google can simply expand its database on users’ tastes and habits. The licensing terms of Google Maps API also reserves the company’s right to place advertisements on websites that use their maps at any point in the future: it would be an aggressive and controversial move, but Google will not rule it out. ‘So control of code is power,’ writes the architectural historian William J. Mitchell. ‘Who shall write the software that increasingly structures our daily lives? What shall that software allow and proscribe? Who shall be privileged by it and who marginalized? How shall the writers of the rules be answerable?’73

  In a similar vein, the company’s ongoing project to digitize the world’s libraries is an attempt to make knowledge freely and instantly accessible online – although Google’s critics argue that it represents an attempt to create an effective monopoly on such data, and point to the prevailing restrictions on it (Google’s books cannot be printed, nor viewed in their entirety: such restrictions will probably only be lifted if the user pays a fee).74 In March 2011 the US Federal judge Denny Chin rejected Google’s planned $125 million deal with author and publisher groups to put over 150 million books online because it would give the company ‘a significant advantage over co
mpetitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission’, and arguably give Google a monopoly on the book search market.75 In September 2011 the company faced a US Senate committee to answer allegations of abusing its predominant position in universal online searches to give its own services better placement, charges which seem likely to grow in subsequent years.76

  Google responds that it is not in its interests to lose customer trust by compromising its status as an impartial provider of online search information. It also argues that copyright holders would benefit financially from the digitization of books. Ultimately, it insists that its users (and registered online groups like Google Earth Community) would not tolerate any move towards a monopoly of information, political partiality or acceptance of censorship. Nevertheless, fears remain about Google’s ambitions in the field of geography as well as books. Users of its applications may not be sufficiently motivated or organized to resist a monopolization of information. Only governments can put in place the necessary checks and balances through competition laws. In the meantime, it seems unlikely that the company can sustain the growing tension between its commercial imperatives and a more progressive, interactive ethos. In this respect, the geospatial technologists at Google Earth resemble the humanist mapmakers of the sixteenth century, like Diogo Ribeiro and Martin Waldseemüller, working athwart political and commercial pressures to broaden the horizons of geographical information. But in contrast to the sixteenth century, modern civil societies have governments, NGOs and online communities to monitor and, where they feel it appropriate, criticize companies like Google.