siiky
2023/02/28
2024/07/04
2024/07/04
book,ethics,society,osm,technology
The entire reason why the lines on a map matter is because maps do more than depict the world. They change the world. They impact how we interact with the world and understand the world. In doing so, they shape the world itself.
As these digital tools increasingly shape how we understand, navigate and ultimately produce the world, our aim is to map the mappers, and ask what sort of world they are creating.
Places that are invisible or excluded from geographic representations will be equally invisible in practice to many people. A restaurant omitted from a map can cease to be a restaurant if nobody finds it, or knows it exists. Likewise, how places are presented within informational augmentations fundamentally affects how they are used or brought into being. In other words, geographic augmentations are much more than just representations of places: they are part of the place itself; they shape it rather than simply reflect it; and the map again becomes part of the territory.
In an early quantitative study of Wikipedia, Ortega (2009) was among the first to observe that the demographic profile of Wikipedia contributors does not reflect the population average, and also that participation within Wikipedia follows a kind of Pareto principle, where the majority of contributions are produced by a minority of contributors.
This is not an unusual finding: in an early, more general, discussion of the promises and limitations of governance on the internet, Nederman et al. (1998) point out that the self-selecting nature of digital communities means that they cannot claim to be representative of the wider population. One cannot expect the outcomes of digital platforms to be inherently fair or representative merely because they are in principle amenable to public participation. Instead, the general expectations should be that, in the words of the authors, 'participants join specialized groups that cater to and reinforce their own interests and even preconceptions'.
Mentions the "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace".