On Christmas Eve I was driving to a hotel in Syracuse with
Erica and Isabel; (I won’t say the name of the hotel, but it involved two
trees). I had printed out the directions
from the hotel website and off we went.
Erica was in the front passenger seat, but she wasn’t much fun. She had just gotten back from two weeks in Israel
and to her it felt like 3 a.m. As we
neared our exit, I woke Erica and asked her to navigate from the paper I handed
her. The writing was small, it was dark
in the car, and the directions were unclear.
Which is a long way of saying we missed our exit. I knew within a mile or two that something
was wrong, but it took another 25 minutes to actually get to the hotel. It was frustrating for all of us. After a few minutes, Erica turned on her
phone and accessed her GPS app and it talked us in.
Whenever I am about to drive somewhere new, I get on
Googlemaps and take a look at where I am headed. I plan out my route and then, if it is
complicated, I write it down on an old envelope or other handy scrap of junk
mail and bring it in the car. I don’t
have a GPS unit in the car or on my phone, so if I make a wrong turn I have to
think my way through the mental map and figure out how to get back to where I
need to be. Usually, I am able to do
this. Though there certainly are times
when I am irretrievably lost, and I then I pull over at a gas station and ask
for directions.
I have a fairly well pronounced sense of where I am in the
physical world much of the time. When my
mind is quiet and allowed to float free, it sometimes creates an aerial view of
the surrounding geography and places me in the view so that I have a concrete
idea of where I am in the world. I like
this about myself. I code it as a useful
life skill that would have marked me as a survivor in the hunter-gatherer days.
Erica sees it as simply another manifestation of my Luddite
tendencies and it drives her nuts that I won’t use a GPS as my first course of
action. She may be entirely right,
seeing how self-diagnosis is notoriously tricky. But I don’t think so. I really value knowing where I am. When I get to a new town where I will be
spending a good amount of time, the first thing I like to do is walk the square
mile around where I will be staying. I
spend lots of time looking at maps and seeing how roads connect and where
important landmarks are. The feeling I
get when I do this is that the place exists independent of me. My goal is to see how to move through the
place as best I can. My existence is superimposed on the geography, but the
place certainly does not need me to be.
By learning the place, I change it from an acquaintance to a
friend.
I feel like our reliance on GPS has taken something from
us. We are losing a geographic sense
that serves to connect us to the places we are.
Just think about the way we see the world when we look at it through the
devices in our cars and phones: What is it at the center of the map? It is us.
And we become the center of the universe. Landscapes exist only as we pass through
them, and then they no longer matter.
All of these thoughts are just half-formed, (at best), but
they feel important to me. I feel like I
am on to something. When I taught sixth
graders last year I demanded they could label a blank United States map with
all 50 states and all 50 capitals in the correct locations. Again, Erica might say this is just another
Luddite manifestation, since any kid could look this stuff up in milliseconds
with the right device. But it feels
important to me that people know about the place they live. At first, this means your block. But then it means your
town, your state, your country, and then your world.
It drives me nuts when I hear people talk about Africa like
it is one country. I pull out my hair
when people lump all Muslims together as a monolithic faith. I cringe when someone from the East Coast
says, (as I have heard someone say), “Idaho. Iowa. Whatever…” I don’t think
that constant reliance on GPS leads to bigotry, but I do think the two can be
connected. The GPS worldview always has
you in the middle, in the place of central importance. In a global age, this sort of
utter-provincialism might be dangerous.
If we don’t understand the broader world and our place in it, we might
be left constantly recalculating.
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