Sovereigns, Spooks, and Hackers: An Early History of Google Geo Services and Map Mashups

Abstract

Google geo services, such as Google Maps and Google Earth, offer popular and powerful geographic ways of seeing the world. This is a social history of the cartographic visions at work in Google geo services and related geoweb applications/ map mashups. These geographic technologies are the result of shifting configurations of power that include state programs, private corporations, and small-scale tinkerer/hackers. Through these shifts, two particular geographic ways of seeing develop and come together: multi-scalar hyperlocal views and aerial imagery. These visual geographic knowledges were used together for military purposes during the Cold War and combined using 1990s video game software. Google popularized hyperlocal and aerial imagery ways of seeing by applying them in its targeted advertising-based business strategy. Hackers re-engineered Google Maps to create map mashups (geoweb applications), and Google executives chose to incorporate those applications into the company's strategy. Constructing this conditional history with its changing knowledges and variety of actors indicates how sovereign power and, later, capitalism had fundamental roles in forging ways of seeing with maps on the Web. Google's maps today have their own limits. They are highly individualized and often consumption-oriented but may prompt new kinds of mappings in the future.

Street-level: Google Street View’s abstraction by datafication

“…Using Street View in practice entails a lot of this toggling back and forth between the aerial and the street-level—between the global and the “hyperlocal.” Dalton (2013) describes such toggling as a “way of seeing [that] illustrates the power of connecting highly local events within a standardized, global geographic scheme” (p. 264). Street View uses omnidirectional, street-level place-imagery, captured by roving fleets of “Google cars” mounted with specialized cameras from over 5 million miles of roads, across 39 countries and over 3000 cities (Farber, 2012).…”

“…There is a history to location’s central role in social informatics (Rose-Redwood, 2006). In large part this history derives from a complex interplay of state, military, and private actors, their intersecting interests, and changing norms of governmentality in terms of territory and communications technology (Dalton, 2013; Rose-Redwood, 2006). However, a sea change occurred after the year 2000, when the United States ended its “intentional degradation” of global positioning system (GPS) signal for commercial usage (White House, 2000).…”

OpenStreetMap in GIScience

“…With the development of the interactive internet, the so-called Web 2.0, and the rapidly growing availability of online-geodata, geoinformation and cartography are undergoing another fundamental transformation O'Reilly 2005). Global corporations with no background in geoinformation are developing new Geoweb applications (on the history of Google Earth see, for example, Dalton 2013). With the proliferation of global positioning systems in smartphones and navigational devices, the Geoweb is part of mobile and ubiquitous practices.…”

Performing the sharing economy

“…Thus the seemingly paradoxical nature of the sharing economy indicates the necessity to examine 'the continual emergence of new capitalist niches, cultures and forms of agency' rather than any 'capitalist monolith' (Tsing, 2000: 143-44). This dynamic between monism and pluralism in framings of the (capitalist) economy is given an additional orientation through the 'digital' (Dalton, 2013;Rose et al, 2014). The digital dimension of the sharing economy opens up the possibility of new appearances and practices of economy.…”