Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Once upon a time, maps were valuable. I remember this one time when we were going back home from Noida and I referred to Eicher Maps to find the way. I was so impressed with Eicher Maps, both its accuracy and its level of detail. With the advent of the smartphone, wrote Justin O’Bierne : “An unprecedented level of detail is now available to the average person, for little or no cost.” You’d expect this to be the “golden age of maps and map-reading”. But as Nick Carr points out : “Even as the map is becoming omnipresent, the map is fading in importance.” Huh? But how can that be? Driving (or walking) directions are the culprit! “If your phone will give you detailed directions whenever you need them, telling you where and when to turn, or your car or other vehicle will get you where you want to go automatically on command, then there’s no need to consult a map to figure out where you are or where you’re going. If a machine can read a map, a person doesn’t have...

Jerry Brotton argues in his book, A History of the World in 12 Maps , that mapmaking has always been a contentious topic, from Ptolemy to Google Maps. Or at least that’s what one book review says. Maps always “shaped—and were shaped by—various political, religious and social movements” , says the review. There were 3 maps I found interesting from his list. The first was the eponymous Mercator map, the one we have all grown up from school, named after the Belgian cartographer Gerard Mercator. It was drawn way back in 1569 and has surprisingly never been improved on, despite its obvious drawback. As a less than 7 year old, I remember a jigsaw puzzle of the world’s map that made it look like Greenland was bigger than India! Wikipedia goes one further and points out that : “Greenland takes as much space on the map as Africa, when in reality Africa's area is 14 times greater.” The cause of such severe distortion is obvious: The Mercator map attempts to “chart the contours of ...

I remember this time over a decade back when we were returning home from Noida and I had to call out directions using (then the best map) Eicher Maps. One would have to do things like holding the map at a weird angle to align it with the direction you were travelling or risk mixing up your left and right turns. Fast forward to today and pretty much everyone uses Google Maps. Speaking of which, I found this interview with Michael Jones of Google Maps revealing. When asked about the biggest change that’s happened to maps, he said: “The major change in mapping in the past decade, as opposed to in the previous 6,000 to 10,000 years, is that mapping has become personal. It's not the map itself that has changed. You would recognize a 1940 map and the latest, modern Google map as having almost the same look. But the old map was a fixed piece of paper, the same for everybody who looked at it. The new map is different for everyone who uses it...So a map has gone from a static, st...