![]() Here I want to overcome the primary superficiality in which digital cartography is being addressed, making way for insights into the assumed-natural state of mapping technologies and their narratives of use. More important still is what they tell us at a second glance, what is actually being mapped behind their most external layer. These discursive mechanisms of maps – and their modern representatives, the geographic information systems – show how they became a political force in our society. When seen this way, they can be associated with certain ‘cartographic discourses’ or with persuasive and rhetorical applications, and not just as something meant to name and to locate. Maps can indeed be understood as a kind of language used to mediate a particular view of our world. In general, this power can be related to the production of cartographic documents and the systems that enable it, to map literacy, to conditions of authorship, and to the very nature of the political statements that are made by these new pieces of technology. Brian Harley, cartographer and historian, ‘political power is most effectively reproduced, communicated, and experienced throughout maps’. In other words, maps are being reinterpreted as structures of power: they distribute authority between different individuals or groups of people. While online maps may for some time have been considered as neutral pieces of technology, geographers, sociologists, and historians are now treating them as cultural-based artifacts with an ideological bias that inherently accompany their design. Although privacy and maps are two words that rarely share the same sentence, we start to understand more and more that spatial annotations can be revealing when linked to possessions, habits, and other types of behaviors. Location-based services are being recognized as participative ways to normalize surveillance: a process through which leakages of personal information are seen as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ in everyday life. Within this logic of data collection, tech giants (first and foremost Google, followed by Facebook, Apple, and Amazon) increasingly assign value not only to our identities but also to how we interact with physical space. The idea that one’s data is being collected for numerous surveillance-related motives is no longer part of a distant dystopia. But what are the practical consequences of the increased proliferation of devices that can determine our location? Could one say that surveillance is already taken for granted as we passively provide our coordinates to others? As ‘check-in’, features in social media and games grow in popularity they pinpoint users in relation to everything else in the network, making physical context an essential input for online interactions. Pokémon Go, Facebook check-ins, Google Maps, public transport apps and especially smartphone apps are increasingly becoming traceable and locatable. ![]()
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