GPS navigation…but what is it doing to us?

Abstract

In the classic film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Butch and Sundance try every devious trick they know to lose the posse chasing them. Yet they keep coming on, prompting Butch to exclaim in exasperation: "Who are those guys?" Spotting one man on the ground, looking for clues, Sundance thinks it's Lord Baltimore, a "fullblooded Indian…who could track anybody, over anything, day or night." Perhaps the fictional Lord Baltimore was portrayed a sigma or two out on the bell curve of Native American tracking ability, but survival in a pre-GPS navigational milieu demanded such skills. This paper will examine the flip side of GPS navigation, asking what the technology doing it all for us is also doing to us. The conventional wisdom insists that we have better things to do than find our own way from here to there without turn by turn directions. While it may be true that losing the ability to find one's own way, as once we were compelled, may be no great loss, as a tributary feeding into the river of what's going on across the board of human skill erosion, it's a symptom of far more serious summing going on.

Navigation Aid use and Human Wayfinding: How to Engage People in Active Spatial Learning

“…This is realized by the navigation systems. The consequences of using such systems in this way are well-known: These aids free the user from the necessity of engaging with the environment to find the right way [8]. People no longer need to actively participate in planning a route, they do not need to encode or transform spatial information [9], they only need to follow the information given by the navigation-system.…”

Perspective Chapter: The Creative Surrogate

“…Ultimately people will disagree about the best way to navigate, and there are reasonable arguments to be made for older ways and newer approaches. Citing anthropological research and the philosophy of Albert Borgmann, Jeff Robbins argues in his analysis of GPS that "our addiction to the power of technical order [renders] us increasingly helpless without our conveniences" [5]. Could the same be said for using machine learning as a creative prompt for writing?…”

Measuring commitment to self-tracking: development of the C2ST scale

“…The experiential effects stemming from self-quantification are rather unexplored, making it challenging to fully comprehend the long-term effects that this particular automation experience may have on a users' self-understanding. Take GPS trackers as an example, while incorporating such automation systems into our everyday life facilitates navigation, it, simultaneously, can erode our sense of direction simply because it is too convenient to offload the responsibility of guidance to the GPS itself [31]. Could it be that the use of self-tracking technologies also leads to similar experiences?…”