
Global Impositioning Systems - Is GPS harming our sense of direction? - tortilla
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/2009.11-health-global-impositioning-systems/
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jerf
I find that it has greatly improved my sense of direction. I live in an area
where the roads are not always a grid (to put it lightly... having lots of
lakes is fun for everyone but the civil engineers), and the GPS device has
helped me correct my mental map of my area (which I am also relatively new to)
several times now where I was off by as much as 30 or 60 degrees in what
direction I thought I was going. (Between trees, clouds, and the fact that you
probably shouldn't be staring at the sun while driving, if it weren't out-of-
view most of the time anyhow, I find most conventional absolute cues to be
useless.)

I suspect that rather than being an absolute problem, it has more to do with
how you use it. Using it exclusively in turn-by-turn mode, such that it never
displays any context beyond the next turn, is probably a bad idea. Using it
zoomed out so it shows the surrounding half-mile or so (or more on highways)
is what I find helpful. I never wanted to find alternate routes to things
before because you just never know what on earth a road is going to do without
a map (dead end? immediately shoot off in the wrong direction? who knows?),
and the GPS unit is a map convenient enough to actually use. Even when I use
it to travel to areas I've never been to, it helps me strongly orient myself
and learn the 'lay of the land' in a way that simply driving once through an
area, following your host to some specific place, really can't. It's like
having psychic knowledge of the area you're in.

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DanielBMarkham
GPS is eliminating our sense of direction, not just harming it.

Now if you view GPS as a tool like fire or clothes, that's progress. If you
view it as a crutch that prevents skill acquisition like googling for papers
or Cliff's Notes, that's worrying.

Either claim seems extreme. But I know that any future war will include
attacks on GPS. And I'm really fascinated at how society will respond to that.
After all, it's not like in the past a missile could take out "fire"
"language" or "clothes" Those were ideas. GPS is a computer system.

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jacquesm
Absolutely. I have to really pay attention when driving with the navigator on
if I want to find my way on foot later in the town that I'm visiting,
_especially_ find the car again.

This never was a problem before, but then again, then I would get lost while
still in the car.

Amazing how quickly you can get dependent on a piece of technology. The movie
'the knowledge' deals, amongst other things with knowing every nook and cranny
of London, that's no longer part of the course I guess. Miss TomTom will take
care of that one for you.

Sometimes scary stuff happens: Once I was driving in Budapest and the
navigator told me to turn right at the end of the street, right into about 6
lanes of oncoming traffic. Amazing how fast you can back up if you have to!

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Tuna-Fish
Yes. In the same way as the invention of fire harmed our digestive system and
the invention of clothes made us less resistant to cold.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Short comment: Only really relevant if you think navigation is an irrelevant
skill, and replacing it doesn't matter.

Longer comment ...

Nice, neat, glib, clever, and completely ignoring the research that's starting
to come out in response to the plethora of anecdotes.

People used to be able to add columns of figures without difficulty, and now
they generally can't add two 2-digit numbers. People used to be able to make
change, and now they rely on the till to tell them how much change to give.

Maybe these are skills people don't need, but they are skills that have
declined at the same time technology was introduced. Furthermore, places where
the technology has not been introduced, the skills remain. I won't argue cause
and effect, I'll leave you to speculate.

People now buy gadgets for "brain training" and guess what - they make you do
sums! Wow! Calculators that make _you_ do the work!

It's true that fire gave us more and better food, and it's true that better
clothes have made it possible to live and work in harsher climates, but the
point remains. Research is starting to show that people's abilities to
navigate are declining.

Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe it's a good thing, but dismissing it as glibly
as you have simply seems to miss the point.

I'm not pining for the old days. I reach for a calculator as easily as the
next person. But when someone today said they'd bought 400 Christmas cards for
ukp95, then couldn't decide if that meant they'd been 24p each or 2.40 each,
that's a concern. I'm equally concerned when someone tried to find my house
recently and turned up three hours late. We're not on his SatNav map, and he
couldn't read the map.

Maybe it doesn't matter, but it's not in the same class as fire or clothes or
glasses or pottery to keep food or sewerage to take waste away or any of the
other technological marvels we take for granted.

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ig1
They're actually 0.24p each :P

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
No, they're ukp0.24, or 24p. Your comment is like saying that you've added
your 0.02c. Two cents is $0.02.

In case it is the souce of your confusion, UKP is "UK pounds sterling" and "p"
is "pence". There are 100p in 1 UKP.

~~~
ig1
Ah ok that makes sense :-)

The general market standard seems to be to use GBP for pounds and GBX
(sometimes GBp) for pence, so the ukp threw me

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davidblair
I noticed that I stopped learning my way to new places a couple weeks after I
bought a GPS.

To fix that, I only use the GPS for the first trip to someplace new. It feels
much more like a tool than a crutch now.

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yason
It's like with any skill obsoleted by technology: as long as everything works
now and the uptime of the social system keeps growing, nobody has to suffer.
But if, or when, the illusion breaks, there will be many people taking the hit
big time.

Albeit a bit far-fetched, navigation with only GPS might be one. Somebody
suggested the irrelevance of basic arithmetics in these times of calculators
and cash registers. Most of us haven't had their life depend on hunting skills
for decades, not to mention the art of keeping lambs and turning them into
warm clothes. So there are all kinds of things that just might save us in the
event of technological or cultural failure if we still knew how to do it.

But then there's the thing that we can't know what's going to happen. It might
be that I will never need to navigate myself anymore, or calculate change. But
I can't know. And on the other hand, holding on to old skills just for the
sake of security sounds stupid as well. Exaggerating, we might learn to live
like cavemen in order to drop any dependence on current culture and
technological advances, and then something else happens that we can't handle,
and then us cavemen die.

If something happens and humans need to take the hit, there are a few points
to consider:

* humans are damn imaginative and very much capable of learning when they have to;

* on the other hand, some of us would just die because they aren't. I wouldn't say survival of the fittest but survival of the most flexible;

* then again, life isn't a right per se -- in the end it's more like a struggle and has always been.

If somebody can't run his life without GPS, he might not do well if his living
environment changes. Then again, it might be a good time to learn to do that.

Nobody has guaranteed us that everything's always going to work out for us
unless we actually invest time and effort in learning new things and
constantly changing ourselves to match the actuality.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Here's another report, this time from July 2009.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8133890.stm>

