[LINK] GPS and the End of the Road

Kim Holburn kim at holburn.net
Mon Aug 22 08:29:13 AEST 2011


A friend sent me a fascinating essay on GPS and the directions of modern technology.  Some of the points they make are similar to ones I've made here before.  Some are rather different.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/gps-and-the-end-of-the-road

> Seen in the right way, what the two novels
(Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, On the Road)
> show us is not the virtue of quitting civilization, but the freedom that comes from finding our own way through a world that is not of our own making — and with it, a glimpse of the possibility of reaching out beyond our everyday selves into something greater. And the progression from Huck Finn to On the Road suggests that the advance of technology and civilization need not spell the end of this possibility, but just the shift of its scenes.
> 
> Why, then, is it so hard to imagine some form of this journeying as occurring today? In part it is because of that homogenization of place enabled by the open road — the lessening of its difference and so its significance. More fundamentally it is because the mode of travel on the rise today is antithetical to the mode found in On the Road and its predecessors. Rather than being filled with adventure and the possibilities of freedom, the GPS-enabled, location-aware adventures of Sal and Dean or Huck and Jim somehow sound dreary before they have begun, filled with anticlimax, boredom, and restlessness. How can this be, when what these technologies seem to promise is a way of freshly opening up the world?



-- 
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
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