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CROSSROAD: The future of the paper map seems to be directionally challenged.
By Hanna Bernbaum, Focus Editor
With the speed and convenience of GPS devices comes a reduced dependence on printed maps. However, whether a GPS or a printed map is more effective in giving directions represents a fork in the road for most.
A car or cellphone equipped with GPS (global positioning system) allows the user to enter his or her desired destination and, with the press of a button, receive verbalized directions. Some options consist of a voice alerting the driver when to turn the car. If the driver is actually interested in where he or she is in relation to other streets and landmarks, he or she might look at the screen as if it were an ordinary map. If he or she is hurried or gets further disoriented by seeing a network of lines, the screen may serve a lesser purpose for the driver.
Before electronic GPS devices became commonplace, maps were the main way of finding out where to go. By studying maps, one can become more easily oriented with an area, and therefore can plan a route more consciously. However, if a map reader gets lost or is in an emergency, this is where a GPS could locate certain services. For example, applications for the iPhone such as Yelp follow GPS coordinates to locate restaurants and other services that match the location of the iPhone.
Joel Minster of map company Rand McNally suggests that paper maps will never go out of print. In the way GPS serves as a supplement to the paper map, the paper map is becoming “ a companion to the online or digital map.” While a printed map is static and has a boundary, the paper’s edge, a GPS system has no boundaries since it is electronic and grows in technological memory.
A paper map gives the whole picture of the area while the same trip logged on a GPS device only gives the user a limited view of it. If one was traveling through that area for the first time, one would only know the place in fragments and not so much the connections between roads and alternate routes.
A person relies on a part of the brain called the hippocampus for knowing locations and creating mental images of an area (like on a map). Part of the limbic system, the hippocampus stores both long- and short-term memory, as well as spatial (visual) memory. According to BBC News, in 2011, University College London conducted MRI brain scans on 79 taxi cab drivers who had just completed training—memorizing the layout of London’s streets. The results of the brain scans showed that the hippocampus of each trainee’s brain was slightly larger in comparison to the brain scans conducted on non-cab drivers. This study suggests memorizing streets and locations in relation to each other can help increase spatial memory.
Knowing directions and locations is a skill that is used on the world scale and not just the city scale. Former geography editor of Good Morning America Harm de Blij noted that many high schools as well as universities dissolved their Geography departments, which to him “engenders a geographic illiteracy into [people’s] adulthood.” These reductions of geographic education might continue down that path for the next generation. That is, if they can navigate that path without their GPS.