Dear Friends, I am attaching one of my articles in 2005 , when Google Maps/Earth is introduced.
It was written as a perspective piece in Global south Context in 2005 . It have the limitations of That. But I feel it is relevant to the current discussion on Google maps and Security Concerns . Anivar ---------------------- I am trying to Explain how Free Map is different from Google Maps and Google Earth The ideas & concerns FreeMap is ver different from Google Earth & Google Maps The issues are several, and start with the social origins of geo- spatial technologies. There has always been a widespread public ignorance of these technologies, which until recently had been the exclusive domain of high-end scientific institutions, state bureaucracies, or large corporate organisations. For most of the past three decades, these market and state institutions maintained a tradition of secrecy around their sources, encouraging a perception of maps as a read-only medium produced by experts, not a read-write medium produced by people. Now that maps and geographic information are disseminating more publicly through efforts like Google's, the tradition of secrecy has been abandoned, but the perception of the medium as read-only has been retained and extended in products like Google Maps/Earth, which do not allow active editing, annotation or creation of maps -- only passive browsing, searching, and viewing. Neither the state nor the market has any reason to challenge this widespread and increasingly false perception of maps as read-only, because it is neither in their political or commercial interests. There is not much that is new about Google Maps/Earth, which are simply taking tools and data which have been around for years, designing a new and simple API around them, and delivering these huge datasets of licensed satellite imagery through their network of powerful servers. I agree that it's pretty cool, and I've also had great fun surfing on their servers with the Google Earth application and Google Maps web interface. But Google Maps/Earth is basically about browing and searching, which is definitely useful for navigation, tourism, locating services, and other kinds of consumption activity. Free Mapping, and GIS more generally, is more about analysis and representation, which is useful for decision- making and community action around housing, environment, and civic infrastructure, which is basically a productive activity. There are another set of related issues raised by Google. The state's historical failure to digitise and publish geo-data in the public domain, before commercial providers could get there first. This has created a paradoxical and distressing situation. The transition from traditional geography and its use of static print-based map bureaus, to digital cartography through the use of dynamic, computer-based spatial databases has also resulted in an enclosure of previously public information into a new form of private property. It is interesting that there are so little awareness or public debate around maps and geo-data as intellectual property, when there is otherwise so much(comparably high in indian context. but not active in the context of kerala) attention on the status other media such as music, movies, books, and other earlier forms of print and analogue culture now being digitally produced and distributed. But we are soon about to face a situation where private corporations have more public knowledge than either the state or civil society organisations. This must change. Unfortunately, much of the community mapping, wireless networking and geo-hacking in US/UK/EU often shares the same techno-utopian political aesthetic which now drives Google's own marketing strategies. There is a strong determinism which underpins many non-profit or community projects, which are premised on the naive belief that by simply giving people tools and technologies, that they will magically transform into more open, more empowered, more participatory communities. Perhaps this belief is generated within an affluent society, in which most people have laptops and ubiquitous connectivity, which provide a material basis for certain forms of social and cultural activism, which strike us in India as extremely exclusive and elitist. And in any case I feel that the market is a better mechanism for delivering and disseminating technology than the voluntary sector. We only tend to realise the power of the market once it has already appropriated community projects and practices to serve commercial purposes, shorn of their democratic impulses. Google Maps is the latest example of this trend which has faced many successful free software projects in the recent past. I personally feel non-profit and civil society organisations should focus more on the social practice of technology, challenging both the state and the market to recognise that people drive society, and not machines or money. The shock and horror induced in the European and American hacker networks by the launch of Google Maps and Google Earth, as if somehow they 'got there first', reveals how exaggerated our idea of our own role is, and how little faith we have in people's own practices around information, in spite of all the participatory rhetoric. The culture and politics of information sharing is different societies requires a less deterministic or universalist approach in the development and design of useful tools for communities. In developing countries undergoing rapid urbanisation, where the needs of the urban poor majority for information about their own spaces, to help them organise and make claims for a better life and environment, I don't believe that a commercial medium for targeted advertising to a restricted audience of web surfers has much relevance, except for a small elite. Nor are such commercial efforts a sufficiently open or democratic basis for building a vital public infrastructure, which has heretofore has been out of public reach, as it was jealously guarded by scientists, bureaucrats, large companies and bureaucracies. Google is right now stuck in a thicket of legal and cultural problems in doing a version of Google Maps for India, because most Indian cities are split between a formal and organised sector governed by the laws and master plans, and often larger and more significant informal or unplanned settlements which are controlled through non-legal mechanisms. Basic maps are hard to come by because of the old colonial obsession with territorial security, and this secrecy has rendered urban planning into an authoritarian process captive to the classes who have privileged access to information. In some senses, we are on the same side of the fence as Google and the GIS industry in terms of their battle with the state for greater openness, but where we part ways is in our final objective, which is social and not commercial. In short, what Freemap projects want to do is develop and design simple toolkits and networks through which urban communities can access and use spatial information for self-development, and do it based on public geo-data, free & open source software, and community information. The challenges here are manifold, but they are less technical in their nature than culturally and politically determined. -- "[It is not] possible to distinguish between 'numerical' and 'nonnumerical' algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information." - Donald Knuth -- "Freedom is the only law". "Freedom Unplugged" http://www.ilug-tvm.org You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ilug-tvm" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For details visit the website: www.ilug-tvm.org or the google group page: http://groups.google.com/group/ilug-tvm?hl=en
