Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps

Book excerpt: Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps explores the mundane act of navigating cities in the age of digital mapping infrastructures. Noone follows the frictions routing through Google Maps’ categorising and classifying of spatial information. Complicating the assumption that digital maps distort a sense of direction, Noone argues that Google Maps’ location awareness does more than just organise and orient a representation of space—it also organises and orients imaginaries of publicness, selfsufficiency, legibility, and error. At the same time, Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps helps to animate the ordinary ways people are challenging and refusing Google Maps’ vision of the world. Drawing on an arts-based field study spanning the streets of London, New York, London, Toronto, and Amsterdam, Noone’s encounters of "asking for directions" open up lines of inquiry and spatial scores that cut through Google‘s universal mapping project. Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps will be essential reading for information studies and media studies scholars and students with an interest in embodied information practices, critical information studies, and critical data studies. The book will also appeal to an urban studies audience engaged in work on the digital city and the datafication of urban environments.