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Many of us have had the experience of arriving in an unfamiliar city and needing to get to a specific destination – whether it’s checking in at a hotel, meeting a friend at a local brewery, or navigating to a meeting on time.
With a few clicks of the smartphone, the destination is inputted into a navigational app, with customized route preferences to avoid traffic, tolls and, in cities like San Francisco, even inclines. Anxiety abated, one drives to one’s destination via voice prompts and the occasional illicit glance at the constantly updating map.
Research points to yes. But, given the ubiquity of these devices, as well as their ability to enable particular groups, perhaps we should learn to embrace them as a technological prosthetic.
All cultures practice wayfinding – sensing one’s environment for barriers to travel, then navigating spatially to a remote destination.
For example, Inuit people, faced with snowy, topographically uniform landscapes, are attentive to subtle cues like snowdrift shape and wind direction. Until the advent of GPS devices, those cultures had no cultural conception of the idea of being lost.
Research has established that mobile navigational devices, such the GPS embedded in one’s smartphone, make us less proficient wayfinders. Mobile interfaces leave users less spatially oriented than either physical movement or static maps. Handheld navigational devices have been linked to lower spatial cognition, poorer wayfinding skills and reduced environmental awareness.
While physical navigation and static maps require engagement with the physical environment, guided navigation enables disengagement.
Further, many of our experiences are mediated through technology. Drivers use cars, hunters use guns, and many of us are constantly on our smartphones. In short, as sociologist Claudio Aporta and ecologist Eric Higgs put it, “Technology has become the setting in which much of our daily lives take place.”
In his seminal 1997 article, geographer Robert Downs argues that spatial technologies need not replace geographic thinking, but rather serve as a prosthesis, supplementing our spatial awareness. The increased access to information gives people a new way to quickly and easily explore new landscapes – which can then lead to physical exploration of said landscapes (many of my fellow map nerds do this all the time). We can then focus less on the rote memorization of place names in favor of a deeper understanding of the topography.
What’s more, for some groups, these devices are enabling. Handheld navigational devices can now enable independent wayfinding by those who are sight-impaired. While not without their drawbacks, handheld navigation can empower those with spatial orientation challenges, be they real or imagined.
(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.)
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