Hiawatha Bray

Wandering along the way

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray (Basic Books, $27.99).

Knowing where we are is almost as important as knowing who we are, at least so far as humans are concerned. No matter how Zen our aspirations, being “lost” is a frightening prospect for most of us, and that’s true even when “lost” means on a street that we don’t know in our own home town.

Hiawatha Bray, a journalist with the Boston Globe, has written an entertaining and engaging history of the ways we’ve used to establish our location, including thumbnail sketches of navigation and cartography, as well as taking us all the way to Google Earth.

Admit it. You’ve used Google Street View to get a picture of where you’re going. It works really well for those of us more attuned to landmarks than street numbers.

Bray’s got the experienced journalist’s knack for illustrating what might otherwise be boring technological stories with narratives and characters, and that makes this a very interesting book. He’s also got some insight into the long-range effects of global satellite positioning and the surveillance effects of data mining—one of the more unnerving, although not surprises, reveals in this book is that algorithms now need only three month’s worth of location data on an individual to predict where he or she will go next.

This one’s a lot of fun, and would make a nice gift for someone who’s perpetually making wrong turns.

reviewed by Kel Munger on Lit/Rant: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/86396538178/wandering-along-the-way-you-are-here-...… (mehr)