On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

  Before it was bought by Google in 2004, the software that became Google Earth was previously known as Keyhole, which was co-founded by Brian McClendon. He says he knew he was onto something in the late-1990s, when he and colleagues at his previous company, Silicon Graphics, began combining images of the globe with images of the Matterhorn and nearby terrain, zooming in and out on a piece of hardware that cost $250,000. From the Matterhorn, Keyhole advanced to the Bay Area of San Francisco and zoomed into aerial images of a shopping centre. The commercial breakthrough occurred in 2003, when CNN began using the software in its coverage of the Iraq war. McClendon and his colleagues presented Keyhole to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in April 2004, and had an offer for the company within twenty-four hours.

  Google’s instincts were spot-on. There was so much public interest that when Google Earth launched its free service on 28 June 2005 the entire Google computer system almost melted (and new downloads were severely restricted in the first few days as new servers were deployed to meet demand). By the end of the year, Google Earth had become the key geographical tool on tens of millions of personal computers, and its early adopters would call their friends round so that they could feel slightly queasy together. An atlas had never been so much fun.

  I asked McClendon what he thought the great explorers of the sixteenth century would have made of the world in zoomable form. ‘Oh, they would have completely understood it.’ In fact, they would have known slightly more about the world than early users of Google Maps did. In 2005, Google could only render maps of the United States and the UK, and there was no mainland Europe or Central or South America. The maps it did show were licensed from already well-established companies such as Tele Atlas and Navteq, and a few government agencies, but it had none of its own. The Google world only filled out slowly: in 2007 there was still no Pakistan or Argentina, and there were none of the places first touched by Amerigo Vespucci more than 500 years before. But by 2009 this had been rectified, and Google had captured almost the entire world, enhanced by the purchase of a vast cache of satellite imagery.

  McClendon says there is an assumption that satellites have rendered human mapping obsolete, but they have strict limits: they can’t track local details, they can’t name things, they can’t relate spatial awareness to real-world issues. Satellites may have seen the Antarctic, but they could never define its boundaries or obscurities. In the true wildernesses – the poles, the deserts, the jungles, even the unpopulated regions of fully developed countries – Google employees are increasingly setting off not in cars with cameras on the roof, but with cameras on backpacks and on the wings of planes, and they do well to arm themselves with the knowledge of border conflicts and the heated disputes over nomenclature.

  As it becomes increasingly powerful, Google finds that it encounters obstacles it never anticipated, often geopolitical and social ones that seldom detained mappers with empire-building intent in centuries past. ‘We have places that are named that are claimed to be owned by three different countries,’ McClendon says. ‘And they have two or three names associated with them. We regularly get yelled at by countries. I didn’t think we’d be that important. As it turns out we are more important to argue about than anything else. When the Nicaraguans invaded Costa Rica, they blamed Google Maps for doing it because our borders weren’t right. They said that we just went to the land that Google had given us.’

  On the day we met, McClendon said he had a new and seemingly less controversial passion: mapping the world’s trees. It was a maniacal goal. By some estimates there are 400 billion trees in the world, and Google believes it has catalogued about one billion of them. ‘So we have a long way to go – figuring out how to detect them, locate them, know their species.’

  At the end of June 2012, McClendon gave a talk at the annual convention for Google developers and media in San Francisco. He began with a classic misconception: ‘Hic sunt dracones,’ he said. ‘This is what they wrote on old maps when they were drawing them and they didn’t know where the borders were, to tell the people looking at the maps “don’t go there, you might fall over the cliff”. But our goal at Google has been to remove as many dragons from your maps as possible.’

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  I had been driven to Google by a colleague of McClendon’s named Thor Mitchell. Mitchell began working for Google in 2006 after a long spell at Sun Microsystems, and he now managed a department called Google Maps API, which provided a set of tools to enable people outside the company to make software applications involving Google Maps. These could take the form of constructing location devices on your phone, or using maps on your website to show your restaurant or shoe store and boost commerce.

  We had met at Where 2.0, a three-day conference in Santa Clara, near San Jose in California (certainly near enough to enable people at the conference to joke that they had known their way to San Jose). The conference attendees, who came from eighty countries, were all engaged in the business of maps and location, and the presentations they gave buzzed with phrases like ‘proximity awareness’, ‘cross-platform realities’ ‘dataset layering’ and ‘rich context beyond the check-in’. There were contributions from many of the old big players, including Nokia, Facebook and IBM, and some of the relative newbies too, including Groupon and Foursquare (the concept of ‘old’ in the digital mapping world meant three years or more).

  But the big news that week came not from the scheduled speakers, but from a surprise presentation from two attendees called Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden. Allan, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter, had just finished some analytical work on the Fukushima nuclear disaster when he was ‘looking for some cool stuff to do’. What he found, after some digging in the recesses of his MacBook Pro, was that every call he had made on his iPhone had been logged on his computer with coordinates for latitude and longitude. The information was not encrypted, and was available for everyone to see. He didn’t suspect anything sinister on the part of Apple, but he was disturbed by the potential invasion of privacy. Phone carriers had by necessity logged customer calls to monitor usage and issue bills, but this was something else – the open tracking, for a period of almost a year, of an individual’s whereabouts. Allan and Warden had no problem translating the recorded coordinates into maps, and one particularly striking screengrab from their presentation showed a train trip from Washington DC to New York City, with Allan’s whereabouts being registered every few seconds. And of course Allan and Warden weren’t alone: we were all being tracked, and all – potentially at least – being mapped.

  The glowing promise of digital mapping has other downsides. Because the new digital cartography is really just an amalgamation of bits, atoms and algorithms, it should perhaps come as no surprise that all our WiFi and GPS devices send as well as receive. Some of this information we provide voluntarily when we enable the location option on our photo-sharing programs or apps, or when we let our sat nav feed back traffic information while on the road, but some of it is just sucked from us without our knowledge.

  As we drove to the Googleplex, Thor Mitchell and I talked about the 3-D wonders of Google Street View, the hugely popular web application providing panoramic urban maps of the world. When it launched in 2007 it covered just five US cities, but by 2012 this had expanded to more than 3,000 cities in thirty-nine countries. Billions of drive-by photos had been stitched together to form a seamless cursor-led stroll or drive for its users, and Google cars had driven some five million unique miles to enhance the maps that it had licensed from other companies. But this too was now coming under scrutiny concerning privacy issues.

  Between the beginning of 2008 and April 2010, the cars that had been gathering information for Google’s maps had also been sweeping up personal information from the houses they passed. If you were on the Internet as one of Google’s Subarus rolled by, Google logged the precise nature of your communications, be it emails, search activity or banking transactions. As well as taking photographs, the cars had be
en consciously equipped with a piece of code designed to reap information about local wireless services, purportedly to improve its local search provisions. But it went beyond this, as another program swept up what it called personal ‘payload data’ and led the Federal Communications Commission in the US and other bodies in Europe to investigate allegations of wiretapping. While there is no evidence that Google has made use of the personal information, a spokeswoman for the company did admit that ‘it was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data’. At the beginning of its life, Google had one publicly stated mission: ‘Don’t be evil.’

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  But then there was another problem for Google Maps: something called Apple Maps. In June 2012, Apple announced that its forthcoming new mobile operating system would appear without Google Maps, which would be replaced with a service of its own. This would not actually consist predominantly of maps of its own making, for the company had already licensed Tele Atlas maps from TomTom. But its intent was clear: maps were the new battleground, and Apple no longer wanted to rely on or promote those of a rival.

  But how would Apple’s maps differ, and how would they hope to compete with such a giant in the field? Its big idea, it claimed, was try to bring new consumer joy to digital cartography, in the way it often did to other services. It promised greater ease of use, smooth integration with both its software and hardware, and an enhancement of such things as 3-D imaging, voice directions and live traffic. It would attempt to add real-time information allied to public transport, commercial buildings and entertainment venues, possibly enabling seat reservations and other purchases through iPhone credit.

  Two things were happening at once here – integration and exclusivity. The technological capabilities of maps continued to astonish, and they were increasingly becoming what they had been in the age of the Spanish conquistadors – guarded, proprietary and inestimably valuable as routes to further riches. Google responded to Apple’s withdrawal with a weary shrug that said ‘good luck – it’s a tough world out there’. It told a press conference that it invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year on its mapping services, and that in eight years it had built up an army of snowmobiles, boats and aeroplanes to achieve its aims. It promised a new feature called Tour Guide, enabling users to ‘fly’ over cities in 3-D. It also dramatically cut the prices of using its Google Maps tools on websites with heavy traffic, from $4 per 1,000 map loads to 50 cents per 1,000 map loads.

  This wasn’t the first time Google’s mapping had faced serious competition. At the time of Apple’s announcement, the online directory ProgrammableWeb counted 240 companies offering their own map platforms, more than double the amount in 2009. Some are bigger and more comprehensive than others. In 2009 Microsoft launched Bing Maps, an improvement on its earlier Virtual Earth with a refreshed ‘bird’s eye’ view and an expanded global range (its base maps were supplied by Nokia’s American subsidiary Navteq, which also supplied Yahoo Maps).

  And a few days after Apple’s announcement there was the prospect of another major player. Amazon’s Kindle devices and an anticipated Amazon smartphone would both benefit from handheld mapping, and the leaked news in June 2012 that the company had recently purchased a 3-D mapping start-up suggested that the journey was well underway.

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  At Where 2.0, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the principal architect of Microsoft’s Bing Maps, promoted his product in a novel way. It was ‘an information ecology’, he claimed, which provided a ‘spatial canvas … a surface to which all sorts of different things can bind’.

  In one sense this appeared to be a new artistic vision, but in another it was merely a new grand language to describe something that had been going on elsewhere for a while – the map mash-up. This had been happening in music, especially, the ability to take one bit of a song and crash it into another, an extreme form of sampling. The same was now happening with maps, and it was the hottest cartographical trend of the digital age.

  Personalised, crowd-sourced additions may render a map subversive, satirical or simply newly useful. A list of the most popular mash-ups on ProgrammableWeb (in the middle of 2012 there were more than 6,700 to choose from) includes a map of where items on the BBC News are located in the world, the sites of the Top 50 medical schools in the US as tabled by US News (almost four-fifths east of Chicago) and many marine vessel and flight trackers (so you can point your phone at a boat or plane and find out what it is, where it’s come from and where it is going).

  And then there are others that are just timesucks: the vague location of the ‘Top 99 Women’ as voted by the drooling staff of Askmen Magazine (the red location markers, which are accompanied by photos and videos, are, predictably, mostly sited in California, but there are also top women in Germany, Brazil and the Czech Republic). Slightly more productive are several rock band road trips, on which you may follow the route of fans as they plot cross-country US drives listening to local artists en route (so pass your cursor over Baltimore, Maryland, and you’ll hear Frank Zappa, Animal Collective, Misery Index and more). Most of these use Google Maps and Bing Maps as their base, and all would have been impossible even five years ago.

  One of the most compelling is Twitter Trendsmap (trendsmap.com), a real-time projection of the world on which the most popular tweeting topics are overlayed in strips. Levels of activity vary according to what time of day one calls up the map, but one is usually guaranteed a lot of hashtags involving sport, political outrage and Bieber. To take a European morning in the summer of 2012, arsenal, vanpersie, wimbledon and shard were all trending in the UK, while Spain was covered with black tiles announcing bankia, higgs, el-pais and particula. India, meantime, was busy with secularism, olympics, bose and discovery, while a sleepy Brazil was covered with casillas, buzinando, pacaembu and paulinos.

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  The Twitter map is oddly reminiscent of a project from sixty years ago, when visitors to the Festival of Britain encountered a map called ‘What Do They Talk About?’, a regional survey of conversational habits in the British Isles. Elaborately designed by C. W. Bacon for the Geographical Magazine and Esso (lots of swirling banners of text and schoolbook illustrations, not that far from Matthew Paris in 1250), it stated that everyone talks about the weather, but if you travelled to Northern Ireland they also talked about No Surrender, while in Portsmouth it was Pompey’s chances in the football league. If you went up the east coast of Scotland from Edinburgh to Aberdeen you would also be able to engage the locals with The New Pit, Golf, What the Bull Fetched and Philosophy, Divinity, Fish.

  Such maps continue to thrive in the analogue world, where they are rightly categorised as art rather than engineering, and they have a rich history. We’ve already encountered some of the zoological classics (the eagles and octopuses, the London tube map’s Great Bear) but there are examples in just about any field you can come up with. There are horticultural maps (Bohemia in the shape of a rose from 1677, by the Bavarian engraver Christoph Vetter, with Prague at the centre and Vienna at the root), and allegorical maps such as the Paths of Life (made by B. Johnson in Philadelphia in 1807, showing ‘Humble District’, ‘Gaming Quicksands’ and ‘Poverty Maze’), and also amorous examples that became popular as Victorian postcards (one shows the course of the Truelove River, flowing through ‘Fancy Free Plateau’, ‘Tenderness Crossing’ and the ‘Mountains of Melancholy’ before settling at ‘Altar Bay’ and the ‘Sea of Matrimony’).*

  Perhaps the most celebrated of all is Saul Steinberg’s Manhattanite’s view of the world – a map that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker in 1976 and has been the subject of myriad variations on posters and postcards ever since. In some ways it was a precursor to digital 3-D and birds-eye maps, with the viewer flying over the bustle of 9th and 10th Avenues, crossing the Hudson River into Jersey, and then, with an absurdly telescoped perspective, leaping over Kansas City and Nebraska into the Pacific. A few vaguely significant locations dotted in cross-hatched wheat fi
elds hove briefly into view – Las Vegas, Utah, Texas and Los Angeles to the west, Chicago to the east – and then far off in the distance, the small pink-tinged hallucinations of China, Japan and Russia. The message was simple: everything that happens, happens in self-obsessed New York. It was me-mapping before the iPhone made it de rigueur.

  Steinberg’s Manhattanite’s view of the world.

  The parody has been parodied many times, but the best modern parallel, and certainly the rudest, is to be found in the work of the much travelled Bulgarian graphic designer Yanko Tsvetkov. Tsvetkov, who works under the name Alphadesigner, may well have constructed the most offensive and cynical atlas in the world, all of it stereotypical, some of it funny. His Mercator projection entitled The World According to Americans showed a Russia labelled simply ‘Commies’, and a Canada labelled ‘Vegetarians’. He has also produced the Ultimate Bigot’s Supersize Calendar of the World, which includes Europe According to the Greeks. In this one, the bulk of European citizens live in the ‘Union of Stingy Workaholics’, while the UK is categorised as ‘George Michael’.

  Despite the rigours of digital architecture we should be relieved that maps remain funny, inquisitive and poignant, and that it is often the quirky, inspired hand-drawn one-offs that reveal the greatest truths. A glorious map of the Glastonbury Festival created by Word magazine included locations labelled ‘Man Selling Tequila Off a Blanket’, ‘Route of Aimless 4am Trudging (Contraflow)’, Doorway to Narnia’ and ‘People Actually Having Sex’.

  Or how about the New Simplified Map of London by a secretive (but one imagines local) hand going by the name of Nad, on a Flickr site devoted to ‘Maps From Memory’: