Anna Maj

Google Maps as a new cognitive model. On the empire that built the map in 1 : 1 scale, its strategies of visualisation and politics
The paper concerns the issue of unconscious – but paradoxically – globally shared cognitive models which are designed by Internet corporations like Google. The author concentrates here on the specific model of geographic (and thus political and cultural) knowledge presented by two map services provided by Google – Google Maps and Google Earth. Several significant cases of over-interpretation and misinterpretation of the maps and its errors are described and analysed. The attention is given both to cultural significance of the misunderstood and under-appreciated shift of knowledge, crucial for public discourse and cognitive processes (both knowledge and intellectual abilities) of future society, and to the role of Google corporation in this irreversible process.
Research is performed on political (global), cultural (societal) and personal (individual identity) levels. It indicates three contexts in which maps are interpreted by authorities, societies and individuals – politics (military context), sociology of knowledge (folklore context) and culture (Internet-based identity construction context). It evokes questions on the transforming conditions of contemporary warfare and peace maintenance, the reinterpretation of political borders, the real control of the map, but also some philosophical issues as the truth and falsehood, the necessity of new methods of selection, differentiation and validation of veracity of specific data, the fragility of knowledge, especially socially created and shared. Within media anthropology approach the author presents the sphere of netlore and certain Web community strategies of dealing with obviously false or lacking objectivity data. Finally, the nuances of Google politics and its strategies of data visualisation (which both co-create the described cognitive model) are shown in relation with the topology of map errors and map falsification methods characteristic for neogeography.