Moment of inertia is a place where I'll be giving more of my commentary, in a longer form, on select topics I cover in my newsletter Magnitude and Direction. The goal is to give you 10 to 15 minutes of interesting reading on a topic while you're still in bed - your moment when the inertia of being cozy in bed keeps you there, even though you're awake and getting ready for the weekend morning. I hope you enjoy hearing what I have to say about the topics I cover in M&D and encourage you to participate in the discussion as well.
A map is often a useful, albeit incomplete snapshot of a place, presenting incomplete data for our own benefit. With maps (and our reliance on them) more ubiquitous than ever, though, what are we missing?
Are We There Yet?
All maps omit data. Flattening the 3D landscape to fit on a 2D page (or, more frequently now, a 2D screen), providing only the most relevant details, whatever they may be in that case. Whether a map is laying out an amusement part, highway network, or subway system, you can be sure something has been left off for your own convenience. If you’re trying to navigate the streets of a city you probably don’t need to know what ever single building on those streets looks like, and if you’re riding a train you probably don’t need to know the exact spatial distance between stations. Almost always used in situations where we aren’t familiar with our surroundings, it’s a little ironic that maps proceed to not tell us everything about those surroundings in order to help us better understand them.
The helpful decontextualization of maps can only get us so far, though. The current NYC subway map can tell you what stop to get off at to reach a given neighborhood, but it’ll almost never be helpful when you subsequently want to get to a specific address in that neighborhood. Likewise, a highway map probably won’t explicitly inform you about the unique issues a motorist might face when trying to cross the summits of the Rocky Mountains or the desolate miles of Death Valley. Unless you’re navigating Disneyland or a Six Flags, a single map probably won’t be able to convey all the information you’d want to have over the course of your entire journey (and even the maps of Disneyland won’t tell you where you parked your car).
In recent years, it can feel like the most pernicious aspect of maps’ serial data omissions — their in ability to capture a place’s temporally dynamic nature — is at least on the verge of being solved. Where a paper map was a snapshot of only a place and not the traffic it may or may not be experiencing at any given moment, our digital maps have gotten very good at crowdsourcing data to give us a picture of not only the streets, but what’s happening on them at any given moment. Even these “smartest” of maps often leave out a great deal of context. The lesser-traveled back roads Waze reroutes us to may prove more tortuous and dangerous than we were initially led to believe. We get outraged when the little rideshare car abruptly stops midway through its journey to pick us up, having completely forgotten about the existence of traffic lights. While maybe not absolutely necessary to the function of these maps, these additional bits of information are often greatly appreciated before embarking on our journey.
Maps are a prime example of this data omission phenomenon, but they’re hardly the only one. Even before the pandemic, many people were talking about how the digital landscape is warping the way we perceive the physical one. Two years and one pandemic hence, it is all but guaranteed that we all see the world a little differently now, likely with a bit less of the context we had before. As we start to spend more time in the physical world again, though, it’s probably worth taking the time every now and again to look up from our maps and take in the sights.