Interview on the Guardian’s Tech Weekly about the Power of Digital Maps
Published on 11 Feb 2015
This week’s Guardian Tech Weekly podcast covers the topic of Google Maps’ 10 year anniversary. I was interviewed on the programme and asked to speak about why internet geographies matter. I spoke about the need to think about the digital as something that always has a geography, rather than as an alternate ‘space.’ I also stressed that Google Maps doesn’t just represent places, but rather (if we see the digital as an integral part of spatial experiences and augmented spaces) it is also a part of place itself. We therefore need to make sure that we keep asking critical questions about what it means for a monopolistic private firm to be able to opaquely influence such important parts of our lives (something Joe Shaw and I are expanding on this paper).