Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge? 519
Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Moran writes in the BBC News Magazine that Sat-Nav clearly suits an era in which 'map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.' Sat-Nav 'speaks to our contemporary anxieties and preoccupations about the road,' writes Moran. 'More roads and better cars mean we can travel further, and so the risk of getting lost is all the greater.' But do real men use sat-nav? Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like 'make a legal U-turn' and 'recalculating the route', as stubborn or bossy. Still we don't quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. 'Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections,' writes Moran. 'Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.'"
Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge? (Score:4, Funny)
PROBABLY.
Re:Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge? (Score:5, Funny)
Agree to Disagree (Score:5, Funny)
Re:speed dial (Score:5, Funny)
"Except in the UK, The Land Of The One-Way Roads, Where Straight Lines Are Forever Banished"
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB
Good lord! I've heard of run-on sentences but a run-on acronym? I'm just glad you spelled it out for us - otherwise I would have been lost for days.
Re:speed dial (Score:5, Funny)
"Except in the UK, The Land Of The One-Way Roads, Where Straight Lines Are Forever Banished"
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB
Good lord! I've heard of run-on sentences but a run-on acronym? I'm just glad you spelled it out for us - otherwise I would have been lost for days.
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB, is that Welsh?
Re:Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge? (Score:3, Funny)
It I were a network support guy I think I'd have a magic 8 ball sabotaged so it always says "OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD". When people came to ask me about email, I'd say "Well it's not magic! It's easy to check once you understand the basics of the technology" and make a great show of unpacking the 8 ball and shaking it and then show them the answer.
Thanks! Tip your IT guy. Try the cheetos.
Re:Soul-less (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Agree to Disagree (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Meh. It's local knowledge for *everyone* (Score:2, Funny)
We don't need maps... (Score:4, Funny)
Driving is Ireland is really simple because of the efficient layout of our road network.
The directions for anywhere you want to go in Ireland are simple:
1. Drive to directly Dublin
2. Drive to directly your destination
(Being from Dublin, I would suggest that step 2 is unnecessary - but I would say that)
Also, due to the voices, I doubt that we follow GPS at all. If it's English - we'll not listen to it, 600 years of oppression yada yada yada, and if it's Irish, we won't let some muck-savage/D4 ponce tell us what to do.
Although, well probably still end up in the dead-end 'cos that's where all the craic is.
Re:Worst. Directions. Ever. (Score:3, Funny)
I once had the following conversation with someone I was picking up that day:
"Where do you live?"
"I don't know the name of the road."
"Fine, how do *I* get there?"
"Well, you know the big roundabout in Exeter?" (Exeter is NOTHING but roundabouts!)
"No."
"Well, it's not that one, it's the next one."
That was it. Somehow, I found them in time.
Re:Real men don't use tools? (Score:5, Funny)
if real men don't use hammers. I wouldn't use one to open an egg
What's wrong with using a hammer for kitchen tasks? Maybe not opening eggs, but they work great for separating frozen sausages from each other!
Re:Real men use signs! (Score:5, Funny)
Why did you even look at the signs, after all, All Roads Lead to Rome :)
Re:speed dial (Score:5, Funny)
"Except in the UK, The Land Of The One-Way Roads, Where Straight Lines Are Forever Banished"
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB
Good lord! I've heard of run-on sentences but a run-on acronym? I'm just glad you spelled it out for us - otherwise I would have been lost for days.
EITUKTLOTOWRWSLAFB, is that Welsh?
It's got more than one vowel, can't be Welsh.
Re:Agree to Disagree (Score:4, Funny)
You need the one that doesn't tell you distances or names, just general time directions like "Its the road on the left 5 minutes past the other road"
Sounds like the wife: "no not that left; over there!, that way ... look out for the thing ..., it's just, oh hang on that's my phone {rummage} ... "
Real men (Score:4, Funny)
But do real men use sat-nav?
Of course not -- real men navigate the same way they do everything else; with a mixture of power tools and grenades
In other news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Road signs (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Road signs (Score:1, Funny)
Your GPS may pick up on speed cameras, but mine uses proper grammar and doesn't stick apostrophes in places they shouldn't be.
(hint: it's "cameras", not "camera's")
Yes -- but new ways of doing it (Score:1, Funny)
"But do real men use sat-nav?"
Absolutely. But "real men" (sheesh) have their GPS plugged into their laptop computer, plot their tracks in real-time over a fully detailed topographic or satellite imagery map, and they synchronize their camera and GPS date/time so that they can plot the exact location of any photos using GPS photo tagging software. If the trip might be of interest to others, they convert the whole thing into HTML and/or KML automatically and put it on the web for other people to enjoy.
Those silly "turn left here" things? Heck, no. What a waste of time those are, especially since all they usually have on them are the roads. I don't get lost easily -- take me to an unknown city, drop me off somewhere, and I can wander around just fine and find my way back to where I started, whether in a car or on foot. But if I'm trying to find some obscure place off in the wilderness, of course I would take a map, and "turn left" doesn't have any meaning when off road. Why wouldn't I use the modern equivalent of a good topographic map or orthophoto map?
If you're really worried about "losing local knowledge", put it in OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org] :-)
This needs a slashdot Poll (Score:2, Funny)
Your favorite Anti new tech question
1. Is Satnav Destroying local knowledge
2. Are calculators destroying mathematics
3. Are keyboards destroying writing knowledge
4. Are cars destroying cross country running
5. Are medicines destroying death
6. Is Cowboyneal destroying humanity
I wax nostalgic about smallpox... (Score:3, Funny)
Ahh the salad days when a man feared for his life that a plague might ravage through the countryside and kill all him and his neighbors. It really gave a man a sense of being alive and to value his life when he surived those great smallpox epidemics of yore. These days, with the fancy-dancy "vaccine" kids will never know this great wonder of nature.
Why is it whenever some new form of technology that relieves some burden comes along there's always these dumb articles about how it's going to ruin us, and how some aspect of -old thing- was really just great? Any positive aspects of -new thing- are ignored, any negative aspect is amplified and distorted, and anything else that mitigates the negative aspect are also ignored.
Getting back to reality, there's always going to be people who don't have sat-navigation, don't use it, etc. This isn't like a telephone or the internet where you're eventually forced into the technology because everyone else has it.
Re:Road signs (Score:5, Funny)
One drawback is I can't give directions at ALL, but thats minor to me.
My girlfriend can't either, but unfortunately that doesn't stop her at ALL.
Re:We don't need maps... (Score:3, Funny)
600 years of oppression Yoda Yoda Yoda you speak.
Re:Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge? (Score:2, Funny)
What if there were VELOCIRAPTORS in the unfamiliar territory? Then I think the directions would be "Turn left and head up the mountain, don't turn right and walk through the jungle. The VELOCIRAPTORS hunt in packs there".
Re:Road signs (Score:5, Funny)
As a motorcyclist myself I can say with some authority that while they are trying to kill everyone, most believe that they get bonus points for bikes.
Re:Road signs (Score:3, Funny)
What's the difference between a motorcyclist and a soccer mom in an SUV?
The former only drives badly once.
Re:Road signs (Score:3, Funny)
One easy solution would have been to ask Bo and Luke to take the General Lee in the opposite direction at high speed to distract Rosco P.Coltrane while your father-in-law delivers his "junk". Look on the bright side: you are married to Daisy Duke.