Cybercartography Manifesto
From Jose Miguel Hernandez Wiki
CYBERCARTOGRAPHY MANIFESTO 0.2 José M. Hernandez 2004.06.08
CARTOGRAPHY AS FUNDAMENTAL INFORMATION GRAPHICS
All forms of mediated communication owe a large part of their history and their future to cartography, a form which predates written language. Catalhoyuk, an 8200 year old map in Ankara, Turkey graphically depicts a small village and the eruption of nearby Hasan Dag. The oldest known writing, Sumerian cuneiform script, occurred about 6000 years ago. The presence of these artifacts today does not mean that more fragile documents (papyrus, clay, stick drawings in the dirt) could not have appeared earlier. Nomadic cultures had ways to communicate or record spatial data for hunting and traveling purposes. Agrarians may have been mapping for thousands of years before committing to stone. Maps are simplified models created to explain some aspect of the world and they are fundamentally changing for the first time since Gutenberg's press. In this paper I will provide an argument for the technical and social conditions and methods of production of maps in the 21st century. I will describe the existence of a map as a model or system and describe how the science and politics of a model are “black-boxed” along with the representations they model, which can be employed for political or ideological purposes to construct or maintain a social reality. I will describe how models of representation can be considered within cybernetic theory and Sharon Daniel's model of Context Provision . I will conclude with a return to the “traditional” map in the new context of information space.
Cartography can be thought of as a part of the larger practice of graphical information design. The difference between writing and graphical communication is not concrete in that the characters of alphabets are essentially a type of graphical communication. Therefore, this page is also a form of graphical communication. Like a traditional map, symbols are laid out in a two dimensional plane. Characters (in the roman alphabet) themselves have little meaning until constructed into words, which stand in for ideas and become the primary symbols of abstract thought, each with their own structure of meaning. Words combined into sentences form lines which can be thought of as an edge on a map. Paragraphs and entire documents can be imagined as complex multi-dimensional models (imagine a brainstorm flowchart) of intersecting ideas which as a whole form a larger more abstract idea. Linearity may be a result then, not of the formal constraints of writing materials or medium or the ideas they represent, but of the temporality in which we humans have traditionally experienced certain forms of information such as spoken language.
Edward R Tufte suggests that "The principles of information design are universal - like mathematics - and not tied to unique features of a particular language or culture." By this, he means that a basic graphical literacy is innate - there is a lowest common denominator for visual recognition of graphical concept, perhaps the ability to separate noise from signal, amongst humans. The rules which govern the associations between meaning and image are fundamental to those of meaning and written language. Guy Debord attests to the power of the image in Society and the Spectacle. This paper can only scratch the surface of an investigation into the difference between cognition of meaning in written language and information graphics, which may be a realm for psychology, linguistics or semiotics, the study of meaning. Following is an investigation of the modern map or information graphic with regard to the communication of models, both spatial and non in the context of a communication-driven society, specifically the “map” in science, politics and art. It is my suspicion that the encoding of meaning in all visual communication can be governed by a similar set of rules with individual sets of sub-rules. Maps, then are fundamentally no different to film, television, paintings, bumper stickers, magazines or video games. Where film and video have camera angle and zoom, a map has projection and scale. A film's mis-en-scene is a cartographer's “selection.” Composition, positive & negative space, is significant to all visual mediums. The differences from one visual medium to the next are the coding structures (language, gesture, path/node) of meaning which they employ.
MAPS AS MODELS, BLACK-BOXING REPRESENTATION
A map is a verb and a noun, a model and a modality, it locates while it is a location. It is also a system and a network. A map “inter-subjectively communicates”(SD) subjective perspectives of spaces both imagined and real, tangible and inaccessible. Cybergeography.com is an example of the variety in representational form that can be considered as a map. The word cartography beckons a time when the world was being “conquered” through exploration, categorization and subdivision by the Greeks and then Europeans. Maps are a “history of mapper, in relation to that which is mapped and an act of communication with the other(s) who will interpret and use it.” (SD) Maps as information graphics do not necessarily correspond to physical space or scale. Likewise, maps can exist at all scales, suggesting an overlap between geography, cartography and architecture. All of these areas are becoming theoretically destabilized or reformulated by the invention/extension of digital/virtual space. Maps (even purely geographical ones) presented as virtual/software spaces inhabit their own architectures of relation and presentation.
Haggett and Chorley present mapping in the general “terms of information theory” in their 1966 account of pre-computing geographic science: Physical and Information Models in Geography. The authors describe a “New Geography” in which much work had taken place since 1960. They describe the “fact, the model and the paradigm” as levels of scientific conceptualization of geography. In essence, the authors provide a 3-scale model for conceptual geographic models in which facts compromise models and models compromise paradigms. Within this framework, a “model-based” approach is enthusiastically put forth in opposition to a “paradigm-based” approach to geographical representation - which they see as “the traditional reaction of man... to make for himself a simplified and intelligible picture of the world... substitute this cosmos of his own for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it.” Models are “representations” or “approximations” which are “selective”, “structured” and “suggestive” toward “reapplication.” Models function to “create a bridge between observational and theoretical levels; and are concerned with simplification, reduction, concretization, experimentation, action, extension, globalization, theory formation and explanation.”
Here, geographic modeling is explained in a framework that bears striking resemblance to two other models: semiotics (syntagmatic/paradigmatic) and Bruno Latour's Black Boxes. Latour seeks to illustrate the rhetoric and politics of scientific fact production. Latour collapses debated technological concepts (or models) into “Black boxes,” which are sealed from debate and incorporated as truth into larger paradigmatic boxes. For example, software developers need not worry about the internal workings or technical debates of a hardware standard, because it has been “black-boxed” or accepted as scientific truth or standard. Map technology fits the Latour “Black-box” model in both production and use. Thus construction of scientific reality, representation of reality (models and maps) and the semantic meaning of that (interpretation of representation) are theoretically approached with similar sets of models. The suggestion that meaning in representation may be “black-boxed” is then approachable within existing frameworks. A deconstruction of meaning, ironically, is also a production of simplified models.
MODELS FOR DECEPTION AND CONTROL
A map, as any communication, is bound to the subjective biases of its creator(s). In the introduction to How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmonier describes the basic "cartographic paradox: to present a useful and truthful picture, an accurate map must tell white lies... To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat piece of paper or video screen, a map must distort reality." A map is no more than a perspective, reality or literally, a 'world-view' framed and scaled to show some things and hide everything else “obscuring signal as well as noise.” (C&H) a) It would be impractical or impossible to produce a map that is a full-scale truthful model of reality for obvious reasons. Map users may not always realize that they are borrowing a subjective perspective - letting someone else “think in their head.”(SD) Much like television, there is no license or certification required to create maps. Anyone can claim to be a cartographer, yet maps have an almost instant common-sense acceptance (especially well presented or useful maps). There is little public education on map use in the United States except at University level.
Maps are created by institutions, organizations and corporations to serve or represent constituencies both political and symbolic. Mapmakers are unelected elites. To simply assume that the map-makers know best is to assume that the underlying institutional forces which brought the map into existence were in some sense righteous – that they “knew” the constituency being presented and when and where to “draw the line.” When a constituency is presented to itself by an outsider, it can choose to accept or deny the representation. In the case of geography, it may be more convenient to accept representation than to refute it.
Monmonier provides several examples of how Nazi propagandists created maps that were intended to manipulate American opinion and policy, which they managed to pull off to some extent early in the war. Maps are significant to political processes of power influence. From a Marxist perspective on ideological function (Gramsci), map as information communication might be imbued with an ideology and disseminated from ruling class to the ruled, minority to majority. An elite (Bottomore) ruling class with the means of production (capitol, technology) might make use of a map (demographic maps on FoxNews for example) as social machinery for constructed-reality domination (Berger). The graphical information of a map expresses a triad of relationships between the constituent, representation and reality. The constituent, in search of an enhanced perspective, gains someone else's subjective perspective or identification of reality and accordingly realigns their relationships and identifications with the reality represented. Identity, according to Berger's Social Construction of Reality, is “of course a key element of subjective reality... and stands in a dialectical relationship with society.” A map acts not only as a representation of space, but a tool for shaping the subjective reality of others through perspectival identification with a model of a reality.
The concept of land ownership (public/private) is an example of one of the most basic components of capitalist society and is a social norm in any capitalist country. A map must always choose whether or not to refute or reinforce that assumption amongst many others. This normative function (noted by Chorley and Haggett) is probably why most maps themselves are “owned” by a single controlling entity (even in communist states). The opposite extreme would be a map owned, produced and controlled entirely by its constituents – those who identify or have some relationship with the spaces represented (or concealed). The reality is that map-making technologies are highly specialized and “black-boxed”, rendering them inaccessible to the general public.
MODELS AS SYSTEMS: CYBORG ARCHITECTURES AND THE INHABITATION OF THE MODEL
Electronic maps provide a new possibility for dynamic inter-subjective feedback, increasing the number of subjective identifications and types of models that can be represented within a map. While sophisticated mapping technologies (GIS) have been around for some time (after 1966, C&H), only in the last ten years we have begun to see a fundamentally new kind of electronic map made possible by the Internet. Though only a privileged portion of society is actually able to “go online” due to such things as class $tratification, those who can go online have more accessibility to much more flexible and dynamic mapping systems. Mapquest has become an extremely popular tool for navigation despite its grossly inaccurate directions and overall poor quality in comparison to an average paper map that you can get at any gas station. Many are willing to trade accuracy for universal convenience. May the most convenient product win the “world-view” of its users? Map quest, while very convenient, is not at all flexible. Any programmer will tell you that the data is dynamic, yet the map is not. As opposed to interacting with the user it simply reacts, dictating lousy directions. How can a map be more flexible and dynamic? At time of writing, a significantly more advanced system, Map24, was able to pinpoint a 7-11 in my neighborhood. This is not quite what I had in mind.
Norbert Weiner writes of Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in Cybernetics. The core of his argument is the notion of feedback in homeostatic man-machine systems. Feedback is a significant concept in many areas of art practice including video art, digital art and public/social art. When applied to social or political models, feedback can be imagined ideally as the loop from the bottom of a hierarchy to the top. United States democracy for example, establishes a muddled feedback system from constituents to politicians through polls, mass-media and other questionable mechanisms. In theory, one constituent has just as much political influence as the next, but in reality the system often treats constituents as statistics and classifies on a series of simplified binaries (opposed by Harraway, Cyborg Manifesto) that do not necessarily reflect identifications of subjective reality. Electronic maps have the power to incorporate interactive feedback mechanisms. If one considers a map and its constituents as a cybernetic system model instead of a static document disseminated from authority to isolated individuals, it becomes apparent that both the map and the constituents must continually adjust their identifications to suit each other's needs – in Weiner's terms, like a furnace with numerous thermostats or in Douglas Engelbart's terms, a map augmenting human intellect augmenting a map.
As theories of space and relationship collide in the age of information , distinctions between studies of space (architecture, geography and cartography) have been reduced to little more than scale, perspective and coding structure or filter. A unified study of space (both “meatspace” and virtual) will focus on the dualities between the physical and the virtual as opposed to holding them in binaristic opposition or separation from one another. William J. Mitchell's City of Bits is a definitive leap into new conceptualization of space. He declares:
We are all Cyborgs now. Architects and urban designers of the digital era must begin by retheorizing the body in space... a worldwide, electronically mediated environment in which networks are everywhere, and most of the artifacts that function within it (at every scale, from nano to global) have intelligence and telecommunications capabilities. It will overlay and eventually succeed the agricultural and industrial landscapes that humankind has inhabited for so long.
The model then becomes reality and reality becomes a model. If this fits at all with Winston Churchill's comment on architecture “We make buildings and they make us,” then it would follow that we are not so much developing technologies as we are modeling ourselves.
There is a backlash in trying to model virtual spaces according to the rules of meatspace: some rules no longer apply but are carried through anyway. Where graffiti artists have had issues with the definition of “vandalism” and “property,” there is no such issue in cyberspace, where writing a file does not cause aesthetic damages to a system's hardware. In recent years, intellectual property protectionism has thwarted another urban expression: the remix. Meanwhile, the streets are canvassed with nets of little cameras for our own “protection.” Cultural institutions politically defined in meatspace fight dialectically with the emergent and autopoetic social systems of cyberspace. These institutions meld and hybridize. The Utopian promises of the web may never be realized if there is no surface space allocated for the under or misrepresented.
CONTEXT PROVISION AND COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS
A cybernetic map system/model/space opens the possibility to blurring distinctions between cartographer and constituency, author and authority as well as the very definition of a map. Sharon Daniel refers to this practice in art as Context Provision. Her charge is to “ethically engage the social complexity of life.” Following the tradition of social art practice, Daniel claims that modern art establishes a barrier between artist and audience. She refers to Stephen Willats' Art and Social Function, a documentation in which he employs a cybernetic model (as an information graphic) to argue that there are two discrete cognate loops in any static piece of art: one between artist and artwork, the other between artwork and audience. “There is no form of interaction between the two (artist / audience) which could generate mutual understanding as would be the case in successful conversation. In the absence of such a procedure both the audience and the artist become locked in their own perceptual biases.” This model for cognition of art can be applied to any mass-produced visual medium. Television rating systems are a kind of feedback mechanism that arguably works to the advantage of the broadcasters, who fine tune content for profit. Maps in the older paper medium do not consistently have popular feedback mechanisms, such as a letter to the editor or suggestion email.
Context Provision aims to break the socially irresponsible barrier between artist and audience through agency. Daniel focuses on Walter Benjamin's notions of the author, citing his emphasis on avoiding “appropriation and (mis)representation, to change the technique of traditional artistic production.” or in Daniel's paraphrase, to “intervene, like a worker, in the 'means of production'.”
Beyond mere interaction, Daniel emphasizes that an artwork must provide a context within which participants can take on the subjective reality of an other. Sharon Daniel extends the specifications of Justine Cassells' Feminist Software Design identifying a new subject position in which “the cybernetic collapse of subject, technology, and information into a single perceptual/experiential system” produces the “system_subject” within collaborative social systems which can be categorized as “autopoetic” (self-organized) or “emergent” (cellular). Daniel explores five forms of framing in a collaborative system: Memory (memorials), Archive (histories), Map (location/places/positions), Agent (actions) and Community (relations). Memory and Archive are the database from/onto which subjective experience is drawn. The Agent and the Community are a singularity, exchanging and accessing Archive and Memory through Map.
ACTIVISM / ORGANISM
Sharon Daniel champions grassroots media activism. “Media representations are always actively mapping a complex geopolitical terrain, that must be examined from several perspectives... those who control the technologies of representation, both scientific and political, show the world as they see it – or wish it to be seen” She cites blogs (emergent) and wikis (autopoetic) as archive/communities that have some democratizing value despite the bourgeois context of their production. Daniel mentions how surveillance technologies provide institutions with a blanket coverage of our physical spaces – sometimes covering entire city zones. Political mapping and surveillance initiatives such as remote sensing have the “power to contribute to the domination and marginalization of both natural environments and human populations” As such, the grass-roots mission to subvert/invert/take control of the means of production of the dominant models of representation is incredibly multi-faceted – considering the complex nature of representation itself.
Steve Mann's Sousveillance is the movement to reverse-survey, often through cyborg apparatus such as a body-mount webcam. By extension, P2P journalism (sometimes refers also to the blogosphere) is a cyborg counter to mainstream video-journalism. I wrote another paper on a “SmartDoc,” which is essentially a spontaneous(think flashMob), collaborative moblog (mobile-device blog) centered around a media event such as the NY blackout and the LA fires. Together, these activities constitute a type of information gathering and sharing that subverts and competes with mainstream corporate interests.
Edward Mac Gillavry (webmapper.net/carto2003) refers to an interesting combination of media and mapping technology in activism he calls “collaborative mapping,” which is a form of context provision and traditional cartography:
Just as bloggers daily create and edit web pages to maintain their weblogs and thus revolutionize online journalism, so anyone with a location-aware device could potentially create their personal map. Collaborative mapping is an initiative to collectively produce models of real-world locations online that people can then access and use to virtually annotate locations in space
As a cartographer by trade, Gillavry sees potential for the traditional map in the new information space. He too makes a distinction between “grassroots and corporate initiatives.” Mac Gillavry models his own idea as to how he thinks maps could and should operate:
The value of the annotations is determined by physical and social proximity (expressed in distance and 'degrees of separation'). Thus, the information is not only filtered based on proximity, but also ranked according to the trust one person has in another person through social networks: the “Web of Trust.”
Mac Gillavry is referring to the recent emergence of social network services (friendster) and technologies (foaf, p2p authentication, openprivacy, collaborative filtering) which expose connections and extend or exploit direct social-context awareness. He has tuned into the high-tech pop-culture, from a technological standpoint of expertise and has observed an area which has not been exploited or developed anywhere near its current potential by the corporate or activistic interests. It is possible to suggest that web-cartography, wikis and blogs could hybridize into a new form of social media in the next few years.
An example of an area in which grass-roots mapping activism is ahead of the corporate game can be found in the difference between two web-based wifi-locating services (wifimaps.com and wifinder.com). Wifinder is a database of businesses which have chosen to advertise their location's wifi service. A user searches by zip-code and receives a list of results for that city. Wifimaps on the other hand,is a geographical information system that feeds off of an open user-contributed war-driving database. Wifimaps resembles a remote sensing dataset, revealing thousands of networks both open and closed, while Wifinder looks more like a shopping list with minimal guided results. Corporations have begun to fight for control of the information provided by location-sensitive communications technologies which will undoubtedly converge with other forms of communications. The agencies who control mapping technologies will control the map data and the ways in which we get to see it and use it and see ourselves in it. Infoglut and decentralization have already been identified as a challenge to the grass-roots efforts. Corporations are masterful at filtering, the act of separation of noise from signal. Activists have the huge challenge of filtering enough of a signal to keep the corporate noise at bay.
THE FUTURE OF INFORMATION AND POWER: OPEN LIFE
The Open Source movement is considered by many a civic duty to the people. Despite claims of Microsoft & gang, some aspects of open source (Linux) have had considerable effect and influence in the mainstream territory – much more so than any existing “independent” resistance to the dominant media forces. Perhaps one of the most interesting possibilities for the use of collaborative mapping is on another political battleground, local politics and (sub)urban planning. The Open Space movement is the conservation, stewardship and sustainability of a non-renewable resource. Open Source methodology can inform the Open Space battle and vice versa. All space is a resource which requires stewardship – especially the hyper-renewable information space which dominates the physical. Newspapers have long served as the information space in which localities fight for the use of physical space. As more newspapers are corporately owned, the chances for a local community to have a voice of self-representation become slimmer. If a locality's participants had the opportunity to cooperatively constructed inter-subjective models of how they thought their space should be used, not only would the town's people build political power, but a sense of community in the process. The local empowerment and organization of a community can have effect on larger scale politics, deconstructing borders and global/national/local identities. It is suggestible that modern technology could support a model of democracy which does not rely on such vertical, removed and oppressive structures of hierarchy embedded in existing representative-democracy government.
One morning we will wake up and put on our clothes and go outside. There will be no computers or cell phones. We will not need them because our clothes will become them (wearable computers are already quite advanced). When the topologies of the virtual world become sensitive to the topographies of the physical (and vice versa) a new kind of dual existence evolves in which one world or model overlays another. A world rich with data will contextually float in the air around you, possibly as a voice or hologram, guiding and informing you. That overlay model will undoubtedly have a shaping dialectic effect upon the physical or “real” model beneath through cybernetic systems of feedback in society.
I would rather exist and interact in the new space like a blog or a wiki, graffiti or a remix, than previous methods of one-way communication from a corporation, government or institution. This is why I advocate the open/collaborative/community development of a new map – our map. A design should provide context for anyone to contribute to and subjectively re-present any space (real or imagined) in as many ways possible with control as to the data presented (context), who and where it comes from, and at what scale, frame and perspective it is viewed from (filter). A map technology should be non-proprietary and distributed, like the web, but critically planned and structured to exploit existing sets of standards in a meaningful balance between cellular and self-organizing, knowledge and infoglut. It should promote a direct democratic model (in the Athenian sense), going so far as to implement inefficiencies (checks and balances in the social interaction with such a system, like a bit-torrent upload quota). By moving away from a dissemination-based model of representation that favors corporate hegemonic interest, we move toward the grassroots model of self-representation and inter-dependence. One model (one people), potentially infinite sub-models for all.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berger, Peter L. The Social Construction of Reality. 1966, Doubleday & Company.
Bottomore T. B. Elites and Society. 1964, C.A. Watts
Chorley & Haggett. Physical and Information Models in Geography. 1967, Methuen & Co Ltd.
Daniel, Sharon. Collaborative Systems: Redefining Public Art. 2004 (not yet published)
Hall, Edward T. The Hidden Dimension. 1966, Doubleday & Company.
Infoporn. Wired 12.06
Kramer Jane. Whose Art is it? 1994, Public Planet Books.
Latour, Bruno. Science in Action. 1987, Harvard University Press.
Mitchell, William J. City of Bits. 1995, MIT Press
Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps 2nd Edition. 1996, The University of Chicago Press.
Nardi, Bonnie A. and O’Day, Vicki. Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. 1999, MIT Press.
Rheingold, Howard. SmartMobs. 2002, Perseus Books Group.
Shuman Michael H. Going Local. 2000, Routledge.
Tufte, Edward R. Envisioning Information 1990, Graphic Press.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. Montfort, Nick. The New Media Reader. 2003, MIT Press
Willats, Stephen. Art and Social Function. 1974, 2000, Elipsis London LTD.