World Maps and the Dawn of Globalisation
Jerry Brotton (@jerrybrotton), Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London and broadcaster, critic and feature writer, reflects on global mapping and Google Earth in his guest blog from August 2020.
From a distance of 11,000 kilometres above its surface, the planet earth sits in the black void of the cosmos. It appears free of clouds and water, although its ocean floors still sparkle ultramarine blue, the continents a beguiling patchwork of greens, browns and pinks. North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia curve round in a crescent through the right-hand half of the globe. The Atlantic Ocean dominates the bottom left, giving way to the tip of North America, with the brilliant white sheet of Greenland nearly crowning the planet’s apex, looming over the North Pole.
This is a version of the world as Plato imagined it nearly two and a half thousand years ago in the Phaedo, a gleaming, perfect sphere, ‘marvelous for its beauty’. It is the ecumene that Ptolemy projected on his geometrical grid in the second century AD, the globe that Mercator plotted onto a rectangle fifteen hundred years ago, and the earth that NASA finally captured in the first extra-terrestrial photograph of the whole planet taken the 1970s. This is the geographer’s ultimate object of study, a graphic image of the earth (or at least that part of it turned towards the viewer).
This is of course the virtual image of the earth as seen from the homepage of Google Earth, the world’s most popular geospatial application. Since its launch in 2005, the application has rapidly come to dominate online mapping. Of an estimated 1.5 billion people currently online globally, over half a billion have downloaded Goggle Earth.
Google Earth offers its users a level of interaction with the earth unimaginable on printed paper maps or atlases. The application’s display allows the world to be tilted, panned and rotated; geographical places and physical objects can be clicked to provide more information, and even introduce time in the form of video streaming; other data can be integrated and ‘layered’ onto its surface, from political boundaries to historical maps depicting the same region; and users can zoom down through its layers of data, or enter any location on the planet (including their home address), and within seconds they can go from 11,000 kilometres above the earth to within a few metres of its surface, confronted with photo-real, three-dimensional images of immediately recognisable neighbourhoods, streets, buildings and houses.
In less than a decade, Google Earth has not just redefined online mapping, but has led to a complete re-evaluation of the status of maps and the future of mapmaking. Drawing on the now established definition of a map as a graphic representation facilitating a spatial understanding of the world, many geographers would not even categorise Google Earth as a map, and even its creators are cautious about using the term. Drawing on satellite and aerial imagery, the application aspires to a photographic realism free of the usual graphic signs and symbols that now define modern scientific maps. For those who want to work in virtual mapping, training in geography is irrelevant, and their title will usually be ‘geospatial technologist’, rather than ‘cartographer’.
But Google Earth is also the ultimate manifestation of our current moment of globalisation. As information and capital flows instantaneously and invisibly across the surface of an ever-shrinking earth, geospatial applications like Google Earth appear to reproduce this shrinkage of space, where the speed of connectivity replaces the measurement of distance, and every place that ‘pops up’ is invariably followed by something to buy. One of the great ironies of Google Earth’s claims to present a democratic, interactive world of mapping free from state interference is that it is the creation of one the world’s largest online companies: Google. With current assets of over $40 billion, Google utilises its ‘Earth’ and ‘Maps’ applications to support 34,000 searches each second, 3 billion a day on its search engine, driving its annual revenue of $23 billion, 97% of which comes from advertising. Google has successfully straddled the divide between the early language of the Internet, defined by fearful talk of fragmented communities and disembodied individuals, to the new global emphasis on social connections, embodied interactivity and collaborative creativity. And at the heart of its stated mission to ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, stands its geospatial applications, linking everything and everywhere in one enormous global geographical information system.
What interests me as a cultural historian is how significant is this new online global mapping. Is it the revolution that many claim, signalling a democratic transformation in mapmaking? Or is it a baleful step into political censorship, state surveillance, the invasion of privacy, and the surrender of established standards in cartography? The history of cartography suggests that we are, perhaps sadly, somewhere in the middle.
About the author
Jerry Brotton (@jerrybrotton) is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. A regular broadcaster, critic and feature writer, Jerry has written extensively about maps since the publication of his first book, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (1997). His bestselling A History of the World in Twelve Maps (2012) has been translated into eleven languages and won book of the year in Austria. It was shortlisted for the Hessel Tiltman Prize and was a New York Times Bestseller. Jerry has recently curated an exhibition on maps at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (2019).
You can read a longer version of Jerry's article here.
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