The map and the GPS
By sylvie | July 24, 2008
I guess you could call me a map addict. Whenever I travel, I am happiest when I have a map spread before me, keeping track of where we are at that precise moment. For me, the best in-flight entertainment is when they put up the image of the airplane over a simplified map of the ground. Watching the virtual airplane progress through a simple line drawing world is enough to keep me amused for hours on end.
This love of maps began when I was a kid and my family would go on long camping trips. Since we were on the road for hours on end, I would try to figure out where we were on the road map so that I could have a better sense of how soon we would get to our destination. Hey, this was a time when we didn’t have any kind of handheld entertainment system - even the Sony Walkman hadn’t been invented yet (yes, I’m that old) - so we kids had to come up with creative ways to pass the time and the map became my handheld entertainment system.
I like the map because it lets me get a sense of where I am geographically: not just to know if we’re getting close to our destination, but also to see what cities are close, what’s the name of the lake we’re passing by, what region we’re in (if it’s a very long trip). I like the fact that I can get a global picture of our situation
So you’ll understand that I have an ongoing hate-love relationship with the GPS (which, I admit, goes against my usual love of gadgets). I will not deny that it can be useful. Indeed, it’s helped us find a gas station when the van was on empty (and it wasn’t its fault that the stupid gas station had no gas to sell) and it’s helped us find our way through country roads in places we’d never been to.
But the damned screen is just too small for it to serve my needs. Sure, you can always pull back to see overall where you are, but then you lose all the fine details, and it’s the fine details that make maps so joyful for me.
And, let’s face it, the GPS can be frustrating. When we went to Cowansville last weekend, we decided to use a route that would keep us away from Montreal (and a good thing we did too, as there was a major road problem). But while we were trying to drive along the road that parallels the US border, the GPS was determined to send us up north to take highway 10. It would keep suggesting that we take every country road heading north that we met. Then, it decided that what we really needed to do was go through the US to get to Cowansville. Finally, in frustration, I grabbed the road map and was able to help André navigate the road that we really wanted to take, something I couldn’t do with the GPS’s small screen. The worst GPS failure we’ve had was when we were driving down to Virginia Beach this spring and the GPS program crashed; luckily we were on a major road and quickly found a tourist information kiosk.
So while I am no longer completely against having an in-car navigation system, I will continue to buy paper road maps as the ultimate back-up.
For more, and better, on the GPS’s limits, check out Elizabeth Churchill’s article, Maps and Moralities, Blanks and Beasties, in Interactions, vol. XV, issue 4, 2008, pp. 40-43.
Topics: Hardware |
