The evidence is overwhelming that maps originated long before semi-permanent, hand-drawn media. Nineteenth century anthropologists, missionaries, and colonialists reported widespread tribal use of sticks to trace hunting or war tactics in the dirt on a mostly imagined map of the terrain. To this day, American Indians and Tibetan monks use colored sand in various rituals to create intricate, startlingly beautiful maps of the unseen, only to sweep them up when the ritual is over.

So before there were maps that lived longer than their creators, and long before there were maps as enduring works of art & wonder, there were maps that came & went. This might be considered another "back and better than ever" property in the broader arc of change printed maps & newspapers are getting swept into. By displaying themselves on a networked electronic medium rather than as a static representation, geographic maps may change as slowly as their print cousins, but what's on them is free to change from moment to moment.

And as the screens displaying maps increase their resolution, what's on them will eventually be able to mimic some of the rich content & beauty of those classic old maps of yore.

What good any of this mind-boggling change is to newspapers is anybody's guess, but there is something compelling about checking out news filtered by latitude & longitude. Instead of sitting down with the paper, it would be fun to start with the street where you live, check out other places on your favorites list, and then explode the map to your wider geographic area to see the most read, dugg, blogged, emailed, etc. stories at the moment. This wider area map of headlines represents the logical equivalent of what you see everyday in the local paper.

Now explode the map to the country as a whole. There you might find late-breaking stories from any news source, perhaps skewed to the more popular national papers like the NYT & WSJ. Now explode to the world as a whole, or navigate to France, Iraq, or Moscow. There are many practical reasons to approach news geographically, but when you don't have one, it's also a lot of fun. An oddly enjoyable thing to do with a Wii is click the map-tacked headlines on their you-spin-it newsfeed globe.

Browsing the news geographically does not compete with throwing some keywords at Google News to satisfy a specific curiosity, but it does provide an amusing, practical alternative to getting your hands black with newsprint. And it adds all that value electronic "multimedia" have a tendency to do - like integrating print with video or audio news stories. It is not hard to imagine how a 3 minute TV or radio story could act as a tease to more in-depth, textual & graphical information - if there was an easy way to access it immediately or mark it for later retrieval.

The dual promises of the Internet are to be able to communicate with "anyone anywhere in any medium" and have access to every piece of music ever recorded, every movie shot, every book written – every representation that ever was - in a single, easy, and fun to use software application. Browsers represent version 1.0 of such programs by being able to display virtually any information interface in existence.

For maps, every kind of map from the beginning of time may come back to life thanks to electronic display innovation.

For newspapers, every one that survives will likely end up aggregated in a variety of different popular interfaces. Maps appear to have a better than even chance to be one of them.

IMP, Inc. works with a wide variety of professional talent to help clients produce audio, video, and textual content for television, radio, print, and Internet distribution. IMP makes content happen in any form.

Comments (2)

Name

Title

Comment

Add Comment