The layers of Google Maps
This research visual presents the evolution of mapping through the lens of Google Maps, inspired by the work of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires. The work divides the evolution of data leading to the creation of Google Maps into three layers: Mapping the Planet, Mapping the Data and Mapping the Self. These layers critically explore events that have led us to where we are today.
Mapping the Planet indicates the machinery, infrastructures and technological advancements emerging in the 60s-70s that laid the foundation for the development of digital platforms. This layer establishes the hardware systems that enable global data collection. These technologies generated the first feedback loop: the machines that mapped the planet also collected data that would flow into the next layer.
Mapping the Data is where the geographical information gathered by these earlier systems became processed, organized and eventually monetized. The launch of Google Maps becomes the defining moment of this shift – turning raw data into an interactive, user friendly platform. Through this layer, a new loop arises: processing data feeds back into improving mapping machinery, and expanding the scope of what is captured.
Mapping the Self forms the last layer, created by the user-generated environment normalised through platforms like Google Maps. The Self is both the consumer and the commodity, sucked into a system of surveillance capitalism. This data, extracted from the user, forms the final and crucial feedback loop, feeding Mapping the Data and ultimately reinforcing Mapping the Planet.
This claustrophobic feedback loop highlights the doom we find ourselves in, as Google Maps continues to extend its reach across all aspects of our lives, each layer continuously sustaining and amplifying the next.
Furthermore, this piece brings together the events unfolding across all three layers of Mapping through their critical implications on the user. These implications are analytical of the privacy and security risks users face regularly—drawing from the chapter in the Atlas of Digital Architecture by Crawford et al. As we have seen, when using Google Maps the user becomes exposed to data being leaked, sold to ill-intentioned parties, and creeping into unintended crevices of the internet. This element, and its persistent vulnerability, has directly inspired the creation of the tool-essay.
THE SHAME MIRROR
The Shame Mirror is a product that exposes the user to the risks they faced along the day while browsing their smartphones and other devices. Through its satirical, infomercial-inspired tone, the product offers an insight into the users’ oblivious digital footprint, as well as various solutions to ensure a safer browsing experience.
The precariousness of privacy and security in the digital world, more often than not, comes from a place of ignorance of the everyday user. One rarely understands the risks of accepting cookies, connecting accounts and allowing tracking from downloaded apps, as all actions happen in an abstract digital universe, far from our physical space. However, data is not abstract, it is stored and sold to corporations rarely holding our wellbeing at heart. The Shame Mirror turns the self inward, holding up a glass to one’s digital deeds, revealing the hidden traces of our actions. In its reflection, shame awakens, whispering that even what is invisible becomes visible. The global data analytics market size, storage, management and worldwide big data industry reaching net worth close to $100 billion, entirely and only generated from the average person’s digital footprint. AI slop, cookies, geotracking are only the tip of the iceberg. Often justified by an unbothered “they can have my data, what’s so interesting about it?”, the Shame Mirror aims at uncovering the implications this passivity towards our data can hold in our futures.
