Map as Lens丨Weibin Kang (wk849)

In the article The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, while mentioned about the “spatiality”, James Corner thinks the definition of “spatiality” is “are moving away from physical objects and forms towards the variety of territorial, political and psychological social processes that flow through space.(94)” The existence of map itself is not just layouts on paper with accumulation of data. With the development of the city, there are more and more immigrant workers are moving to the cities. At the same time, the evolvement of the technology, such as the application of the GPS and algorithm, more and more data could be collected and become the base of the map creating. In this way, map can exist in different ways in people’s daily lives. What maps can do for people is not just supply the layout information of the city and guide us toward certain destination, at the same time, it is more like a media, a frame, that deliver certain ideas toward the residents in the cities.
Applications of map have emerged in many different cell phone applications. Through the navigation app, such as Google map, or Baidu map, residents follow the route drawn in the app to achieve the destination. Through the map of gourmet apps, people explore what delicious restaurants there are around their neighborhood and decide to have lunch or dinner. The ways of the representation of map vary in different applications.
Here comes the problem that, the visualization and application of map makes map more than an object, itself can represent the culture or, more or less reflect the spirit of the city, however, people’s acknowledge and perception about the city are restricted by the city at the same time. All the objects users can see on the map through cell phone application have been filtered by algorithm. The map would prefer to show the most popular ones. In this way, map is like the lens of the camera, people would only see and know the object shown in the map.
People’s utilization and relying on the map narrow the city they live in. We only know what information we gather through the map, but we would never know what have been lost during such procedure.