From The Boston Diaries 10/23/2009 entry
It must be a change of season… because Conman is going on about GPS again. This is a very old argument between Conman and I, especially given our complete diametric opposition on this particular subject. It also happens to be a major irritant for me, every time I hear Conman drudge up more anecdotal cases of GPS blunders and misuse. I think he does it because a) he knows it’ll make me upset (which it invariably does), and b) for some inexplicable reason, he just has a massive boner against the technology.
Because I count myself among the ranks of the “directionally-challenged,” I was a very early adopter of GPS technology–having purchased my first GPS receiver back in 1997–and have been using GPS devices for many, many years since. In that time, I have endured ceaseless ribbing and derision from my friends–first, because I have always been totally lousy at following driving directions (this has to do with a rare eye condition I have called nystagmus that keeps me from reading street names and addresses until I’m practically on top of them), and second because I have to rely on a gadget to know where I am. But I personally feel that GPS has improved my life in ways I cannot even begin to calculate, enabling me to take off to an unfamiliar address without having a panic attack or setting off on a vacation with my family (or solo on my motorcycle) for a few laps around the country without any fear of becoming hopelessly lost, as I am prone to becoming without such technology. And I have a terrible–almost irrational–fear of being lost.
Now, just because I, by my own admission, am “spatially challenged,” doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. I’m a pilot, and have learned the exacting art of aerial navigation using huge, complicated sectional aviation charts and cockpit navigational instrumentation that has scarcely changed since Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic solo. And to be fair, I don’t use my GPS to get me to work and back every day–I wouldn’t be lost navigating around town without my GPS. I also know full well how to read and use a road map, and how to find an address. However, if I were going to an address I’d never been before, I’d damn sure want the GPS receiver along, because it allows me to find that address in about half the time and without the eight-hundred U-turns I’d have to make otherwise because I can’t read the goddamn street signs until I’m thirty yards away from them. And because I’m not an idiot, I realize that GPS will give you the same kind of “pretty close” directions you might get from a friend–but it’s up to you to actually find the place. The GPS will get you pretty close. It won’t always get you there. That’s where your intuition comes in, and I do have some of that, contrary to what my friends might think.
Now, Conman has obviously gone to great length to search the depth and breadth of the Internet to extract from it the most anecdotal, possibly apocryphal, examples of GPS usage gone awry he can possibly dig up. Even in the case of the very article he’s referenced in his journal entry to support his curmudgeonly view of “GPS is a wholly bad technology,” it bespeaks of folks who have a neurological shortcoming in their brains that keeps them from accurately fixing their position in the world at any given moment–and then become hopelessly lost, on a fairly regular bases. And I’m actually somewhat surprised, given Conman’s penchant for GPS-bashing, that he didn’t include this little nugget from the aforementioned article:
[Bohbot, a researcher studying the navigational capabilities of laboratory mice] fears that overreliance on gps, which demands a hyper-pure form of stimulus-response behaviour, will result in our using the spatial capabilities of the hippocampus less, and that it will in turn get smaller. Other studies have tied atrophy of the hippocampus to increased risk of dementia. “We can only draw an inference,” Bohbot acknowledges. “But there’s a logical conclusion that people could increase their risk of atrophy if they stop paying attention to where they are and where they go.”
I’m shocked that I didn’t get a hyperventilating phone call–or, at the very least, an urgent e-mail–from Conman, decrying “See!? I told you GPS is evil and bad! The damn things’ll even give you dementia!” I swear to God that I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Conman published an entry in The Boston Diaries saying that he found an article that says GPS gives you cancer.
I think what makes me so angry is that Conman insists upon repeatedly and vehemently digging up evidence to attack a technology which I feel has improved my own life so very dramatically–and is so incredibly defiant even in the face of overwhelming acceptance of the technology. I could just as easily put the shoe on the other foot and tell him: Hey, Conman, wearing glasses is so dangerous; you could slip and fall, and your broken lens can poke your eye out. I know it’s incredibly unlikely, but hey, man–it could happen! So what you should do is just stop wearing the things. I mean really, what do you need to see for anyway?
Conman doesn’t like to mention the one time that GPS came in really handy for him, too. But don’t ask him about the incident. If you read Conman’s account, you’d think that we were on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride and I was about to drive him off a cliff and directly into the path of hoards of rabid deer. The reality of the situation was that I was trying to find my way back to Tallahassee from the back-roads of very rural Florida, around midnight, in the pitch-blackness that comes with barely-paved roads and no streetlights, with a car-full of passengers whose asses I was responsible for. Now am I really, in that situation, going to pull off to the side of the road and bust out the paper map every few minutes? Or am I going to let my GPS receiver take me back to the Interstate?
I told Conman then, and I’ll say it again right now: I’m a very results-oriented person. We were out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Then we were at the motel. I, and everyone else in the car, have my GPS receiver to thank for the latter. I don’t really give a shit if the route the GPS receiver decided on wasn’t the very best route to get from point A to point B. The end result was we got to our destination unscathed, and honestly, that, to me, was the only thing that mattered. I win.
In closing, it is worthy of noting that the friends who are not Conman and would deride me for my “dependence” on GPS technology have pretty much shut their mouths at this point, especially after witnessing the veritable explosion in popularity of the GPS receiver over the last five or so years. They’re practically standard equipment in new cars these days, and have been commoditized down to the point where you can pick up an extremely good receiver at Radio Shack for about $150.
So maybe I’m not so crazy after all.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:04 am
I know you can drive stick, and you can probably handle a car without anti-lock breaks; I can’t, so you have two up on me there.
I would have less of an issue with GPS if I didn’t feel like people just toss common sense out the window when using them. Yes, you got us from Deepest Darkest Florida to our hotel room via GPS, but damn if it didn’t take us a very circuitous (if not very dark, and deer prone) route. A GPS does you no good if you need to get from Anaheim to El Segundo and it has you going through Compton.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
[...] has responded to my anger-induced tirade about GPS and has included the following quote: Yes, you got us from Deepest Darkest Florida to our [...]
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:37 pm
I thought I’d jump into the debate over here… I research how people use maps. Specifically, I work for the USGS in a research group that helps understand how people will use our maps 5-10 years from now (or more). This job has become infinitely more interesting in the past 5-10 years.
Prior to GPS aided navigation systems and online wayfinding apps like Google Maps, finding your way around hadn’t changed significantly since the invention of the printing press. And before that, it hadn’t changed much in the prior 2000 years. People found their way around using paper maps combined with location awareness (i.e., how to figure out what spot on the map corresponds to where you happen to be).
GPS Nav systems do a pretty damned good job of figuring out where you are. They also do a pretty decent job of telling you how to get around. But these systems are extremely new in the scope of maps. They will improve significantly.
Specifically, a major improvement will be online database connectivity. We already get this in things like VZNavigator and the new Google Android Nav app. The maps in these navigation systems are linked to live databases that can tell you about things like traffic. Eventually, they’ll be able to route you around bad neighborhoods (actually, DC had something like that as a winner in the Apps for Democracy contest: http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/dc-crime-finder/).
We are at a crossroads where one set of skills will be supplanted with another. Like being able to bridle a horse to carriage, being proficient with a paper map will be less necessary. That said, it does still require a modicum of common sense. Utilizing a glass cockpit in a light aircraft won’t prevent you from flying into a thunderhead – but it saves you the cognitive load of dealing with sectionals while flying.
November 4th, 2009 at 1:48 am
Hi Eric. Thanks so much for responding to my post–it’s not often I get comments from folks who don’t personally know me.
You’ve happened to stumble upon a very, very old argument between one of my closest friends and I. As I had mentioned in the post, I have been using GPS receivers since the mid ’90s and have–pardon the pun–never looked back. GPS has certainly changed the way I navigate, both on the road and in the air.
What keeps my friend up at night regarding GPS receivers is that he is totally convinced that if one dares to use a GPS receiver for road navigation, they’ll immediately turn their common sense off and drive off an incomplete highway overpass because the GPS told them to. It is my assertion that while you’ll get the odd individual who will do just that, on the whole GPS users use their devices responsibly, and their natural common sense will keep them from driving straight through the Wal-Mart where the road used to be.
And rest assured, my friend will find the news articles about the one-in-a-million times when GPS usage went totally awry–and then blog it. It reminds me of people who don’t wear their seat belts because they might crash into a large body of water (lake, canal, etc). The odds of doing so: Roughly 150 to 1. You’re really going to bet your butt on 150:1 odds? Heh–go to Vegas. They’ll love you there.
November 16th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
[...] sparked this debate was my salvo of heated arguments (1, 2) on the subject of GPS usage. I love my GPS receiver, Conman decidedly does not, and if you want [...]