I revel in maps that empower indigenous tribes so they can claim their land and assert themselves in front of big corporations. Indigenous people all over the world live off the land they inhabit. They gather, hunt, cultivate and protect an area that needs to be big enough for their communities to sustain themselves. We (mobile beings with medium to high income) can go from A to B really quickly and in the process stopped caring about the space in between.

We can already  look at maps that show us the real time position of trains. I WANT THE SAME FOR FISHING TRAWLERS in east Africa so i can click on the boat, get the captain’s number and verbalise my opinion of his activity at 3AM from a phone booth in cambridge circus.

1. There was a time when maps were analogous to power.

2. Broadcast media came along and rendered maps a little useless as all you had to do was sit in the comfort of your living room and get fed info from the far corners of the earth. Radios and TVs were like confession boxes: watching the news we would be aware of all the shit that was going down, an awareness that allowed us to feel pity thus offsetting some of our guilt. Media spoke of a global village… media spoke a lot of shite.

3. Internet’s first challenge was to connect machines, then people. As we developed applications to connect each other we realised it was all about experiences. Users were being connected by having each one broadcast their thoughts and more importantly their experiences, i.e. photos, videos….

4. Turns out most experiences are physical and happen in a mapped world., i.e. concerts, best cafe in town, just found a bargain in Islington, party at Darren’s in Croydon, first kiss…

5. Users were given maps onto which they could pinpoint the objects they like, their experiences. Devices such as cameras and phones started rolling out geolocation as a standard meta data feature so that ones NY stag party could automatically be added to the map of the city. A new age of maps that mix your experiences and human disasters. Hmm, things could change a little.

6. Space of opportunity for a new ecological consciousness surge. If an oil spill is put in the same surface as the pin that holds my first swim or a memorable holiday, i will care …more. I will be made aware that there is limited space in this playground of ours and that although applications have thus far chosen to display my friend feed as a practical yet boring list,  my friends exist in the same map as i do together with oil spills.

7. Through gaydar i can find a sexual mate in minutes and act upon it. Through seeclickfix i pin point pot holes and broken street lights on a map that is seen by local government. Through openstreetmap i can find the shortest car route between 2 points and drive it. Maps have an inherent call to action.

8. So maps are everywhere and because your friends are starting to exist on maps without crying out privacy rape anymore, we are spending more and more time looking at maps and engaging in more meaningful ways with them (friends and maps and oil spills).

9. Noise. How many filters do you want on your maps? I want to see: all first kisses, potential midget sexual partners, ecological disasters and the location of all hairless cats in my neighbourhood. Filters help personalise information. The danger is that if these filters are not inter-connected they will just serve as blinds and we might as well go back to just lists, with little context. The trick is how can we make these filters interesting and connected so they may trigger serendipity and learning and action.

10. It’s a little sad that I need maps to get to know my neighbourhood, my neighbours. There was a time when my neighbourhood was my map, my world. There was a time when we had neighbours, then we moved on to hyperlinks and friend feeds. We got a little lost.