mapping and controlling reality

 "Google and Apple are saying that they want control over people's real and imagined space."

They were not the first and they wont be the last. Myth making religions made did it far too well.They made the many myths that still control our  minds  and our realities .

 Photography , for me , was about exactly that - a mapping that was about controlling reality through the control of imagination. Photography's visual veracity made it so much easier to make reality  and control people  through their  minds eye. Their imagination. 

Which brings us to the core of the matter. It can be easy to assume that maps are objective: that the world is out there, and that a good map is one that represents it accurately. But that's not true. Any square mile of the planet can be described in an infinite number of ways: in terms of its natural features, its weather, its socio-economic profile, or what you can buy in the shops there. Traditionally, the interests reflected in maps have been those of states and their armies, because they were the ones who did the mapmaking, and the primary use of many such maps was military. (If you had the better maps, you stood a good chance of winning the battle. The Ordnance Survey's logo still includes a visual reference to the 18th-century War Department.) Now, the power is shifting. "Every map," the cartography curator Lucy Fellowes once said, "is someone's way of getting you to look at the world his or her way." What happens when we come to see the world, to a significant extent, through the eyes of a handful of big companies based in California? You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, or an anti-corporate crusader, to wonder about the subtle ways in which their values and interests might come to shape our lives.


The question cartographers are always being asked at cocktail parties, says Heyman, is whether there's really any mapmaking still left to do: we've mapped the whole planet already, haven't we? The question could hardly be more misconceived. We are just beginning to grasp what it means to live in a world in which maps are everywhere – and in which, by using maps, we are mapped ourselves.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/aug/28/google-apple-digital-mapping

"Every map," the cartography curator Lucy Fellowes once said, "is someone's way of getting you to look at the world his or her way."

http://www.petersmap.com/