The 99% Invisible podcast recently ran an episode titled “Search and Ye Might Find” about searching the web: its history, how it’s increasingly failing to do its intended job, and its unintended consequences. One of those consequences has been that we’ve been handing over more and more parts of our memory to search—for example, relying on an old email to give my parents’ new address every time I send them a birthday present or the like. In the past I would have written it in a physical address book or just made a point of remembering it. Utilities? There is a Gmail search function. I didn’t really need to remember it.
There’s another reason I didn’t really need to remember that address: I actually know how to navigate to the place. There’s no need to type that address into Google Maps, and ergo, I don’t need to remember that address. However, that is an increasingly rare example these days. People use Google Maps, or its Waze subsidiary, constantly. Places they’ve been to repeatedly, where they’d absolutely not know how to get there after going back and forth a few times, are still utterly lost to them without the nice lady at Google bursting out orders. Basically, by making sure everyone gets where they’re going, Google Maps definitely showed everyone the way.
For example, my wife would admit she doesn’t have the best sense of direction, but she still uses Google Maps to an extent that is baffling to me. She goes back and forth between our house and a particular place for weeks and months, still running Google Maps directions. Some of it has to do with identifying, avoiding, or reducing traffic in the Los Angeles area, but even after checking the map for red lines, the directions are active. However, I will give her credit. She’s quick to ignore Google Maps when the algorithm gets too cute, trying to save a minute of traffic-related driving time by unsuccessfully making 15 left turns through slow suburban streets… or sending her down a narrow canyon road where she inevitably gets stuck behind another obedient Google sheep driving his masonry truck at 15 mph. It’s not hypothetical.
You get the feeling that the idea of an ordinary map is absolutely foreign to people. Place the map in the car toward North up and watch the viewer’s eyes glaze over as if you had just given him a topographical survey of the surrounding landscape from 1889, annotated in Japanese. Hell, for all they know, they’re looking at a map of Japan.
Oh, and good luck giving clues.
“Oh, just go north on Sycamore…”
“Which way is north?”
Even the basic idea of compass directions is lost. The idea of north makes absolutely no sense if you just listen to a lady say, “go left, insert a slight right turn, etc.” or stare at a zoomed-in, forward-following map with a blue line leading you to an unknown horizon. I literally had someone ask me if they should go north or south on the freeway when driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Fortunately, an answer of, “Uh, think about that for a second,” was enough to reactivate the part of the person’s brain that had been outsourced to Google.
There’s no shortage of news reports of people driving into lakes because the GPS told them so, and frankly, it’s not surprising. OK, maybe driving in the lake is a little surprising, but you just know that people are constantly getting on some crazy road or route that they definitely wouldn’t have taken 20 years ago because of common sense and the most basic understanding of maps and directions .
To be clear, I use Google Maps constantly. I check it for traffic or to see which of the several possible routes is fastest. I use it to find restaurants or shops based on reviews, and of course when I go somewhere new, it’s invaluable. I usually use it as an interactive map and I certainly don’t miss my old Thomas Guide. My parents, on the other hand, rarely use Google Maps and still spend a shocking amount of time discussing how to get anywhere or devising routes for avoiding cockamamie around traffic that doesn’t exist. A world with Google Maps is definitely better. It’s just that a Google Maps-only world where people have turned off their sense of direction and have little knowledge of their surroundings is decidedly worse. On the other hand, just imagine what will happen to us if autonomous cars actually happen.