Capturing Glocality — Online Mapping Circa 20051 Part Two: Mapping Glocalities

This two-part paper explores the sources, motivations, and consequences of emergent online mapping activities, circa 2005. Online mapping, defined as mapping software applications and associated cultural practices that utilize the Internet as a primary infrastructural component, arises as an information retrieval technology, twice-over. Its technological ancestors are maps of territories in the form of geographic information retrieval technologies originating with remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, and maps of information in the form of Web-based information retrieval technologies that comprise search engines and website classification systems. Online mapping is a product of the convergence of these technologies which each had reached a critical tipping point with regard to data management. This paper contends that to reduce and manage excessive amounts of information, each adopted strategies that retailored both Web-based and geographic information management to focus on the local as the site for globally scoped information retrieval. During the Cold War, a clash between the U.S. Air Force’s directive to amass untold quantities of uncalibrated satellite data and the Army’s mandate to systematize and manage that data produced the World Geodetic System and paved the way for the GIS technologies at the heart of Navteq and Google Maps. Now, as the amount of information on the Web grows exponentially, Web-based information retrieval technologies face a similar dilemma. Personalized search (epitomized by Google) and folksonomy (user-contributed keywords) are superceding top-down directory classifications (like the early Yahoo!). Secondarily, while the cultural practice of mapping remains, above all, a matter of representation, this paper asserts that online mapping departs radically from traditional cartography. Online maps forsake the techniques and precepts of visual representation, as typified in centralized, perspectival systems of optics that aspire to global Capturing Glocality — Online Mapping Circa 20051 Part Two: Mapping Glocalities KAthERinE E. bEhAR, MFA, MA extent. Instead, engaging distributed, data-centric systems that operate locally, online maps achieve representation through what Philip Agre describes as technologies of informatic capture. Three case studies (Google Maps, map hacks and mashups, and folksonomy-based neighborhood maps) employ this representational mode to produce maps of glocalities, indicating a cultural shift toward merging dominantly optical and dominantly informational worldviews, and toward infusing global networks with local practices. intRODuctiOn Today, online mapping is as ubiquitous as mobility itself. Emerging from a subway, shifting into gear for a long distance drive, craving chocolate, or desperately seeking a hardware store — all these activities entail instinctively grasping an iPhone and tapping one’s way to its Google Maps app, confident of imminent orientation. More than that of any other smart phone or mobile platform, the iPhone’s widespread popularity can be credited with catapulting online mapping into second nature for millions of users. So even as bloggers are betting on whether iPhones have jumped the shark, Google Maps has become nearly synonymous with the device’s ability to augment reality through customized, datadriven and location-based insights, as relevant to terms of a search query as they are relevant in terms of geographic proximity. In 2005, prior to the iPhone’s introduction, this was hardly the case. That year, Google Maps was released in a browserbased Beta, and online mapping practices swelled in short-lived cult circulation. This project explores the sources, motivations, and consequences of that proliferation of emergent online mapping activities. Online mapping refers to mapping software applications and associated cultural practices that utilize the Internet as a primary infrastructural component. The experimental online maps produced circa 2005 are already obsolete artifacts of a faddish moment, but are noteworthy for their naïve embodiment of the homebrew spirit and distributed production processes characteristic of Web 2.0.1 To delve deeply into the history leading up to their production allows online mapping to serve as a lens, bringing into focus certain cultural currents that reverberated throughout Internet and mapping technologies during the emergence of Web 2.0. Chief among these was a trend toward glocalization wherein global networks and local usage dovetail in a feedback system. Indeed, given the “global village” meme associated with the Internet’s early development, it may be surprising to consider that a main contention of this paper is that, circa 2005, online mapping practices were overCAPTURING GLOCALITY —ONLINE MAPPING CIRCA 2005 PART TWO: MAPPING GLOCALITIES kATHERINE E. BEHAR, MFA, MA PARSONS JOURNAL FOR INFORMATION MAPPING VOLUME I ISSUE 4, FALL 2009 [PAGE 2] © 2009 PARSONS JOURNAL FOR INFORMATION MAPPING AND PARSONS INSTITUTE FOR INFORMATION MAPPING whelmingly oriented to the local. In this way, online maps help to locate Web 2.0 as being, first and foremost, situated. This project appears in Parsons Journal for Information Mapping in two parts, “Mapping Territories” 2 and “Mapping Glocalities,” unified in their treatment of online mapping as an information retrieval technology that is, like all technologies, engineered to accommodate explicit cultural predilections. Yet, technologies enforce and disallow specific forms of behavior on the part of their users. So, just as glocalization implies a continual negotiation between local and global demands, a culture that deploys online maps is also regulated or “programmed” by those maps. Online mapping arises as an information retrieval technology, twice-over. Technologically speaking, its direct ancestors are geographic information retrieval technologies originating with remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software, and Web-based information retrieval technologies that comprise search engines and website classification systems. Online mapping is a product of the convergence of these technologies. Independently of one another, each had reached a critical tipping point with regard to data management. In the need to reduce and manage excessive amounts of information, each adopted strategies that retailored both geographic and Web-based information management to focus on the local as the site for globally scoped information retrieval. In assessing online maps as information retrieval technologies, a central concern must be to analyze the practices through which information is retrieved. In his work concerning technology and privacy, scholar Philip E. Agre draws a distinction between two methods for acquiring information: surveillance and capture. In broad terms, surveillance indicates a cultural model respecting privacy that includes optical, centralized, and coercive techniques for tracking people and things. Capture, an alternate cultural model, refers to informatic, distributed, and consensual systems of tracking. This project explores the application of these concepts to emergent models of online mapping and to the antecedent technologies that comprise it. In general terms, I conclude that online mapping has more to do with capture than surveillance for the reason that surveillance aspires toward a global, total apprehension, whereas capture embodies a local, situated focus. Using these two concepts to consider online mapping leads to a secondary conclusion that, although capture engages users’ voluntary participation, arguably creates greater privacy concerns than would be present in a surveillance situation. Even so, because capture operates through an aggregation of loosely affiliated distributed systems instead of a unified monolithic one, local information capture allows for personal interventions into global systems which would otherwise remain impossible or invisible. In principle, the restructuring of Web-based and geographic information retrieval technologies marked a shift from a surveillance paradigm to a capture paradigm. Attempting to manage people and territories, geographic information retrieval systems relied first on remote sensing and reconnaissance surveillance which eventually gave way to GIS and capture. Just as reconnaissance surveillance is geared toward establishing concrete identities of people, places and things, Web-based information retrieval technologies first sought to facilitate the management of information by developing global systems to convey definitively identified documents. Like geographic information retrieval systems previously, Web-based information retrieval technologies had, by 2005, begun to shift to relative strategies which, like capture, rest on linkage and relative context, rather than a rarified approach to content. Both Agre’s concept of capture and geographic information retrieval systems were analyzed in depth in Part One of this project. In summary, Part One discussed how online maps build on GIS which itself evolved from cybernetic remote sensing systems that produced photographic raster information composed of pixel data. These pixel data were dimensionally stabilized and globally standardized through the inventions of the World Geodetic System and of orthopixels. As a result of the World Geodetic System, the object of surveillance was effectively zoomed out — transformed from the task of gleaning local insights to one of comprehending a unified, global totality. The optical point of view underlying remote sensing was no longer necessary to provide locational context for an image, for the reason that as data, the image itself was already composed of geo-coded units, ipso facto, through ortho-pixels. Hence, the optical character of the image was supplanted by the informational character of the image. From this stage, it remained only for the sequential organization of ortho-pixels to be computationally transformed into vectors. Vectors maintained ortho-pixels’ encoded georeferencing, while being, in informatic terms, more flexible. At the stage of vector data, optics are replaced by location as a means for relating to the world — location itself being an aspect of code. Geo-coded, location is subject to endless processing as one attribute of an inherently scalable, recombinant data form. Online maps are therefore no more about surveillance than they are about any form of looking at the world. Rather, they are about processing the world as a form of information. Part Two, the present portion of this project, begins from this notion, which leads to two important areas for CAPTURING GLOCALITY —ONLINE MAPPING CIRCA 2005 PART TWO: MAPPING GLOCALITIES kATHERINE E. BEHAR, MFA, MA PARSONS JOURNAL FOR INFORMATION MAPPING VOLUME I ISSUE 4, FALL 2009 [PAGE 3] © 2009 PARSONS JOURNAL FOR INFORMATION MAPPING AND PARSONS INSTITUTE FOR INFORMATION MAPPING consideration. First, that online maps treat location informatically. This requires assessing a second trajectory in the heritage of online maps: the history of maps of information. Maps of information are software tools that assist Internet users in accessing information. Where maps of territories aid information retrieval in cartographic space, maps of information facilitate information retrieval in the data spaces, or “cyberspaces,” of the Internet. The two most common categories of information mapping tools are search engines and classification models, each of which are surveyed historically in the first part of this paper. The second insight we gain from the history of mapping territories is a comprehension of how, as a whole, online mapping is both a local and localizing practice and, fundamentally, an informational one. In this trajectory, online maps appear at the point of the inversion of the cybernetic principles of remote sensing. In remote sensing, machines help humans find what is farther; in online mapping, humans help machines index what is closer. This vacillation echoes across online mapping in its negotiations between human and algorithmic judgment, optical and informatic cartography, specific and generalized data and, perhaps most critically, global and local scopes of meaning. The second part of this paper examines three case studies that explore how, circa 2005, online maps embodied and negotiated such hybridizations. Unlike search engines, they made material, inhabited territories informatically findable; unlike traditional GIS, they networked geographic information related to specific individuals, not statistical aggregates. In these collisions of informational and territorial mapping, curious products arose: maps of glocalities. Writing in September of 2005, Danah Boyd offered the following definition of glocalization: In business, glocalization usually refers to a sort of internationalization where a global product is adapted to fit the local norms of a particular region. Yet, in the social sciences, the term is often used to describe an active process where there’s an ongoing negotiation between the local and the global (not simply a directed settling point). In other words, there is a global influence that is altered by local culture and re-inserted into the global in a constant cycle.” 4 Boyd understands glocalization as the motivating force behind Web trends that included technologies like folksonomy and open APIs, discussed below, both involved in online mapping. I suggest that this interchange and ongoing reconciliation between local and global contextualization is precisely the dynamic of online mapping. On the whole, glocal mapping indicates a cultural shift toward merging the dominantly optical worldview, associated with traditional territorial cartography and the dominantly informational worldview, encapsulated in Google’s view of the world as information, and toward infusing global networks with local practices. Indebted to both information and territorial mapping, emergent online mapping was a profoundly hybridized technology. As such, it was caught in between; a product of industries generating global geographies and standardized data sources on one hand and of local users bringing to bear neighborhood territories and personal relevance on the other. While the online maps discussed here were fleeting phenomena, the history of factors giving rise to these practices on the twin fronts of territorial mapping and information mapping suggest that as online maps engage local capture toward globally scoped information retrieval their technologies grow more glocal over time. CAPTURING GLOCALITY —ONLINE MAPPING CIRCA 2005 PART TWO: MAPPING GLOCALITIES kATHERINE E. BEHAR, MFA, MA PARSONS JOURNAL FOR INFORMATION MAPPING VOLUME I ISSUE 4, FALL 2009 [PAGE 4] © 2009 PARSONS JOURNAL FOR INFORMATION MAPPING AND PARSONS INSTITUTE FOR INFORMATION MAPPING PARt tWO: MAPPing glOcAlitiES