Despite being a born-and-bred Londoner and an avid cyclist, my sense of direction, even here in my home city, is notoriously dire. That gag about not being able to find your way out of a brown paper bag? If behind every joke there really is a kernel of truth then, where exiting paper bags is concerned, I’m that kernel. Or at least that was the case until 2008, when the iPhone came into my world. Within days my hardwired sense of direction was upgraded. And since then, all those old excuses for getting lost or being late have been rendered null and void (save the odd drop in network or an unforeseen loss of power).
Yet I find myself burdened by a nagging concern: has this upgrade actually been such a positive transformation? Did I not maybe, just maybe, lose something precious – a strange form of innocence perhaps – in the process?
Amidst the furore of last month’s Apple/Google Maps debacle, it became apparent just how reliant the technophilic world has become on mobile mapping. Every iPhone user I met became outraged recently when they found themselves burdened with iOS6’s new (flawed) native mapping system – many of them the kind of folk who, in the pre-iPhone days, could have been counted on to always know which way was North, that this was the right road to take. Such is the power of the demure, all-knowing, ever-present digital map.
Centuries ago, when Medieval cartographers where drawing up maps of the cities that were blossoming around them, they were seeing the world from a perspective that was essentially untenable save for God-on-high himself. Yet at the close of the 1970s, from the vast windows of New York’s World Trade Center, this was precisely where the French philosopher and social scientist Michel de Certeau stood for his seminal The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), holding just that perspective: deific, all seeing, profoundly elevated. As he looked down upon Manhattan, he perceived the totality of the urban sprawl spread out beneath his feet. And that totality spoke to him. The passage of the many ant-like people that scurried around the squiggled streets below became a text for him to translate; the city’s living signature scribbled by the men and women at ground level, blind to the wider pattern and structure seen from above. A self-styled Icarus, de Certeau’s new-found height had made, in his words, “the complexity of the city readable.”
