Mapmakers are competing for your smartphone
WHAT IS A map? “There are two things you want,” says Peter Birch, product manager for Google Earth. “One is to find your way…how do you remove all the information except [what] you really need to answer your question?” The other is the “opposite of the cartographic aim: to create a sense of reality, a completely comprehensive representation of the world.”
To do the first, you have to do the second. So that anyone can find precisely what he is looking for, he must be able to look for anything. Google’s plan for the physical realm, in other words, is the same as for the digital one: “to organise the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful”. It wants to map every last hiking trail and park bench, and then make it easy to find.