Why is Apple’s map fiasco such a big deal? It’s only one app of the hundreds of thousands available for it’s mobile platform. And it’s not like it doesn’t work entirely, there are just some glitches – albeit some pretty significant glitches, but not unfixable and not that render the app entirely unusable. Here’s why I think it’s a big deal: When Apple replaced a perfectly good, well-functioning mobile mapping app with one that is perceived as untrustworthy, they robbed users of a newly found sense of greatly expanded functional reality. In other words, they shrunk their users’ world.
Google Maps is undisputably the most used augmented reality technology. Augmented reality technologies use the data capabilities and myriad of sensors jammed into modern cellphones and mobile devices to enrich our sense of the reality in which we live. With them, we expand our “functional reality”, i.e. our personally experienced sense of our surroundings and understanding of how we can use it, far beyond anything that our senses could give us. Since I’m in the Twin Cities I’ll use downtown Minneapolis as an example to explain what I mean – it makes for an excellent example because of some its oddities:
Let’s say that a tourist has arrived in Minneapolis for the first time. She is staying at a downtown hotel situated right on the Nicollet Mall, the main pedestrian thoroughfare through the downtown area. On her first day, she decides to go out and get a simple fastfood sandwich. She goes all the way from one end of the Mall to the other and does not find a single Subway, Potbelly or Jimmy Johns (all fastfood sandwich shops that are found throughout the Twin Cities). All she finds are a handfull of upscale bars and restaurants. Our tourist rightly finds this odd. Here she is, standing in the middle of a central hub that is meant to serve a metropolitan area of over 3 million people, and she can’t find a stinkin’ sandwich shop!?!
Now, here’s what’s odd about downtown Minneapolis. Because Minneapolis gets unbearably cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer, the entire downtown area is linked through an intricate system of skyways that connect all of the buildings. You can walk through the entire downtown area without ever going outdoors. Inside this skyway system is where you will find most fastfood restaurants, small shops, etc. Our poor tourist may be standing a mere 1-200 feet from a sandwich shop, but she has no way of knowing it unless she enters a building and goes into the skyway system. Although she perceives all of these buildings around her and can even see the skyways stretching between the second floors of the buildings, the restaurants and shops in the skyway system are not a part of her functional reality. They are a component of her surroundings but she has no way to make use of them.
If our tourist has a smartphone with a decent informative mapping app, she can pull this out and simply search for a sandwich shop in her immediate surroundings. She will quickly realize that she is surrounded by fastfood joints of every imaginable sort but that she can’t see them because they’re all in the buildings. Suddenly, she is able to make far better use of her surrounding environment because her smartphone has greatly expanded her functional reality.
Modern smartphones expand our functional reality far beyond our immediate surroundings and enable us to do things considerably more complex than simply finding a nearby sandwich shop. I can easily find the best way to bike from the Twin Cities to Stillwater, 25 miles away. Heck, I can find the best way to bike to Chicago, for that matter (according to Google Maps it’s going to take 39 hours – best I get going)! I can see where my friends and family are located, even the ones who are halfway around the globe.
The gist of all this is that this large and, hitherto, mostly obscured world that we live in has become remarkably transparent and knowable all because of Google’s reliable and functional maps. They have expanded our functional reality far beyond what our immediate senses are capable of perceiving. Apple shrunk that reality down to a comparative nothing just when their users had gotten used their new found knowledge by replacing Google’s maps with their own shoddy and unreliable mapping app.
