Noone R. Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps

Routledge, 2024. — 161 p.Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps explores the mundane act of navigating cities in the age of digital mapping infrastructures.Noone follows the friction routing through Google Maps’ categorizing and classifying of spatial information. Complicating the assumption that digital maps distort a sense of direction, Noone argues that Google Maps’ location awareness does more than just organize and orient a representation of space — it also organizes and orients imaginaries of publicness, self-sufficiency, legibility, and error. At the same time, Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps helps to animate the ordinary ways people are challenging and refusing Google Maps’ vision of the world. Drawing on an arts-based field study spanning the streets of London, New York, London, Toronto, and Amsterdam, Noone’s encounters of "asking for directions" open up lines of inquiry and spatial scores that cut through Google‘s universal mapping project.Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps will be essential reading for information studies and media studies scholars and students with an interest in embodied information practices, critical information studies, and critical data studies. The book will also appeal to an urban studies audience engaged in work on the digital city and the datafication of urban environments.The Lost Art of Location Awareness.Two Starting Points.
The Lost Art of Reading the Map.
A Sense of Direction.
Orienting Location Awareness.
Programming Location Awareness.
Reorientating Location Awareness.
The Art of Location Awareness.
Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps.Geographies of Public Good.Organizing | Grafting.
Organizing Space: Ground Truth and Street View and Performances of Objectivity.
Imagining a Public Vision.
Organizing Safety and Risk.
Grafting Publics.
Thank Goodness for Google.Geographies of Self-Sufficiency.Exploration | Experience.
Exploration: Make the World Your.
Why We Map the World.
Exploration and "What the World Has to Offer".
Experience: Accessing Time.
The Insufficiencies of Access.Orientations of Legibility.Templates | Surfaces.
A Template for the Legible Map.
A Surface for the Legible City.Orientations of Error.Faults | Absences.
A Fault in the Map.
The Shutdown.
Absence.Epilogue: Reorienting Location Awareness.