A Timely Family-Values Tribute To 14 Years of Google Street Maps

In these terrible times of BIG TECH and FANG getting trounced in head-turning scathing pummeling as well as insider staff revolts and delayed whistle-blowing, it's interesting to note the turns taken aimed to appeal to a certain audience by author Sirin Kale writing today in The Observer and reproduced in The Guardian.

Different episodes that are related are accompanied by cute illustrations like this one:

The ObserverGoogle Street View

Memory lanes: Google’s map of our lives

‘I drag and drop Pegman, the Street View icon, outside my old school…’ Google Street View.

Illustration: Phil Hackett/The Observer

Google’s Street View helps us navigate the world, but it’s also a portal on forgotten places and secret moments

Sirin Kale

Sat 30 Oct 2021 10.00 EDT

 

FIRST SOME LITERARY KEY FACTS

> When Street View was launched in May 2007, it was touted as an opportunity for users to “quickly and easily view and navigate high-resolution, 360-degree street-level images of various cities across the world”.

> Street View was initially conceived as a way to improve the accuracy of Google Maps and it is still used by Google as a way of keeping Maps up-to-date, for example by removing defunct business listings.

“Its primary focus,” says Google’s Paddy Flynn, “is to make the user experience in Google Maps more real.”

> Fourteen years later, Street View has been extended to 87 countries across the world, including Swaziland, American Samoa and even Antarctica.

> It has captured more than 10m miles of imagery and taken on a significance to many users that goes beyond its utility as a navigational tool.

During Covid, searches spiked 10-fold, as users roamed the world in search of open spaces beyond the confines of home, supermarket and park. “It was a way for people to feel more connected to the real world,” Flynn says, “see places and take virtual tours.”

> On Street View, we have a panoptical view of the world and all the mysteries, non-sequiturs and idiocies that are part of everyday life. Here is Sherlock Holmes hailing a cab in Cambridge; a car submerged in a Michigan lake containing the body of a long-missing person; Mary Poppins waiting on the sidewalk at an amusement park; a caravan being stolen by a thief.

> Maps have always been a vessel to try to contain the daunting abundance of the world by putting a cartographical stopper in it.

“Maps have been around since time immemorial,” says Flynn, “and technology… enables digital representation. It is one thing to digitise maps and make them widely available and accessible. But that reflection of the real world is something that people are also looking for.”

> Rather than offering a facsimile of the world we live in, Street View offers something more profound: the opportunity to spot loved ones on familiar streets, unaware that their errand or commute would be captured for posterity by the all-seeing eye of a camera-mounted Street View car.

> Street View reveals us for who we really are, rather than the versions we present to the world. The criminal mid-theft; the inquisitive grandmother at the window. Because most of the people captured are unaware they are being photographed, the images evoke a sense of intimacy and verisimilitude.

> When we see ourselves on Street View, we are reminded that we are peripheral players in a much greater narrative; passersby in another person’s story, rather than the centre of the photographic frame. When we catch a glimpse of our loved ones on Street View, we see their hidden, solitary life.

> But Street View does more than just capture our loved ones in candid moments. Because you can turn back the clock on earlier versions,

Street View allows us to move through digital space in a non-temporal, non-linear way and connect with the past on an emotional level.

 

[. . .] HERE'S AN EXCERPT FROM THE AUTHOR'S FOCUS AND WRITING STYLE

 

"“A sense of place is so important in memory,” says the photographer Nancy Forde, from Waterloo, Ontario. Her Addressing Loss project asks users to submit stories and images of loved ones they miss, and the comfort they’ve found remembering them via Street View images from when they were alive.

“We tend to remember addresses or places that were meaningful, and how things looked like when we were kids. And that’s what’s so special about Street View,” Forde goes on.

“Even if a home is renovated or changes, we can recognise something familiar in it. If something meaningful happened to us in that spot, it implants in our hippocampus.” The interface of Street View, Forde says, mirrors the ways in which humans remember. “You can zoom in and out,” Forde says, “and there’s this telescoping. It’s a little blurry at first, and then it rights itself. And I find that very evocative of how our memory works. We can try to remember something, and it sharpens as we’re talking about it or encountering it.”

To all those who use it, Street View evokes a sense of freedom, in a rules-based, time-bound world. “You can see bricks and mortar that aren’t there any more,” says Selby. “Shops you remember that aren’t there any more. I just wish it went all the way back to when I was born. But then I’d spend all my time on Street View, not in the real world. It’s almost like a game but based on reality. A driving game. You’re in the seat and you can go wherever you want to, to whatever year you want to.”

TAKE THE TIME-TO-READ MORE BETWEEN-THE-LINES if you like Nostalgia

Memory lanes: Google’s map of our lives

Sirin Kale

the Guardian