Shortly after the first photograph of Earth from space entered our collective imaginary in 1946, Sputnik was launched and the process of satellization (to use Baudrillard’s term) began. The fruit of this historical period was a new privileged view—higher than the aerial inaugurated by the airplane. Perhaps the most riveting aspect of using Google Earth is its method of positioning the user at the scale of the global, in a very literal sense of the term. Staring at the digitized planetary representation on screen, we hover for a few seconds in this privileged visual space before “zooming” into our favorite haunts and then “zooming” back out again. It is these exercises in scale that make Google Earth such an interesting object of study. We realize, with this program, that we not only now possess a “global” consciousness and map at the planetary scale, but that the global image itself is interactive—capable of being manipulated for the purposes of both diversion and action. What Google Earth demands from its users is an investigation of how—through these exercises in vision—it complicates issues of scale that have become so central to contemporary cartographic thought.
Google Earth defaults to a setting of 11,001.001 kilometers above earth—enough of a distance to appreciate the curved contours of the blue planet, its edges apparently aglow against the starry darkness of outer space. Provided by NASA, it is a visually pleasing image. We can see where land ends and water begins—all the rest is hidden. This perspective is what cartographers refer to as the “God’s Eye View”; it is a kind of visual objectivity long practiced by those attempting to craft aerial representations of the Earth. One has to assume this positionality in order to create globes, atlases—those cartographic reproductions that we have long been accustomed to consult. But accusations of appropriating the “God’s Eye View” emanate from critical geographers seeking to demystify the objectifying tendencies of the map. Donna Haraway, in her elaboration of the possibilities of a feminist science, warns us against the “God-trick,” against the desire to assume disembodied positions of “objectivity” (a term she ultimately reappropriates for her project). De Certeau, in “Walking the City,” makes a similar theoretical move. Beginning his essay on the 110th floor of the WTC—a God’s Eye view in itself—he rejects this position in favor of the ground and appropriately shifts the entire essay to this level of analysis.
What happens at the 110th floor of the WTC (or at the dizzying altitudes of Google Earth) is an arresting of the complexity below. De Certeau sees what the cartographers and philosophers of geometric space see: “the technological system of coherent and totalizing space that is ‘linked’ and simultaneous” (102). Peering at NASA’s globe is an act that unifies: you hold the entire planet in the space of the computer screen. De Certeau finds this unifying act problematic; it is a capitalist spatial logic that dictates universals in order to facilitate production: Universal Time just as much as unified, universal space. At too high an altitude, we totalize. Or, to take a phenomenological perspective from Bachelard, at high altitudes we also—in a parallel conceptual move—minaturize. Minaturization, for Bachelard, reflects a desire for possession. Those aerial perspectives from the window of an airplane (similarly represented at various altitudes of GoogleEarth) minaturize the landscape: houses, cars, sidewalks, streets: all become rendered as tiny pieces of a large puzzle. Trees in Google Earth look like broccoli. At just under a kilometer, Google Earth turns the world into a plaything, phenomenologically diminishing the terror of such heights.
In a postmodern era of “fragmentation,” it would seem that a bit of unification—anything capable of rendering some sort of picture of the totality (as Jameson desires) would be a welcome analytic. Jameson writes of the fragmented experiences generated by airplane travel: disjointed movements from place to place, the lateral homogeneous space of airport terminals that does nothing to diminish this spatial confusion. Google Earth seems, in its “fly over” mode to reinsert the spaces obliterated by air travel. Moving Google Earth from “Durham” to “Detroit” takes us on the route between those two locales, a route that highlights the continuity of the space. Moving from LA to NY reminds us that the two global cities are actually located on the same continental space—a geographic fact that becomes obscured in high-speed plane (and rocket) travel. By using the idea of “continuity,” we do not mean to suggest a homogenous, unified space; rather, in following critical analysis of “scale” we aim more to understand how Google Earth—with its ability to convey a continuous sense of space—potentially disrupts hierarchical notions of scale.
Many theorists argue that scale emerges with the capitalist organization of space. Neil Smith notes how scale is, despite its seemingly neutral status as a method of representation, socially-produced (62). To that end, scale becomes a way by which “spatial difference ‘takes place’…” so that “the production of geographical scale is the site of potentially intense political struggle” (62). Scale is political. In its temporary “resolution of…[the] contradiction between competition and cooperation,” it marks out boundaries at which exchange can and cannot take place (64). In effect, scale freezes political action at particular sites (i.e. “the local”). The concept of “jumping scales”—a popular tool of scalar transgression—involves the expansion (or leakage) of political acts, concerns, etc. out of their assigned “spheres” and into more higher-order scales (i.e. the nation-state). An example of how scales jump, and one that feminist geographers often make note of, is abortion. Starting at the scale of the body, this issue works its way out of the seemingly limited space of the individual to the level of national legislation. The personal is political, when you jump scale.
To return to Google Earth, the question becomes: does Google Earth facilitate a jumping of scales? If, as Smith et. al contend, scale is socially-produced, does Google Earth provide a visualization of the ease at which scale is jumped? It seems that in its presentation of the continuity of space, Google Earth works, at least to some extent, to magnify how all space—and thus all scales—are interconnected. The ease at which we can move back and forth through scales seems to unhinge the foundation of any rigid hierarchical orderings of space (with the top levels of the hierarchy always exerting influence over those underneath it). Or perhaps another term, “scale bending,” might better encapsulate Google Earth’s manipulation of scale. To bend a scale is not to destroy it but to unfix it, to loosen its conceptual hold. In Google Earth, it is just as easy to zoom in as it is to zoom out. Zooming is one (almost) continuous movement (depending on the available data). As such, in order to experience scale, we have to re-map it ourselves over the terrain.
Granted Google Earth is at present limited by the fact that it cannot accurately represent ground level. When you near the ground, you have the option to switch to the 3-D modeling mode where, if users of Google Earth have created 3-D models of the buildings at ground level, you can navigate this space. Right now, the availability of 3-D models is sketchy so that the best viewing distance remains from above. This seems to be more of a technical limitation and one that could, if Google so desired, be easily adjusted. One can imagine the kinds of scales that Google Earth could potentially represent, one day zooming in on individual human beings in real-time, moving beneath the epidermal layer into the muscles, tissues, cells, nuclei, to end at what? The genetic layer? It, too, is being mapped. Complaints about our contemporary world often point to the condition of the individual, adrift in a sea of finance capitalism that denies spatial orientation. As Scott Bukatman notes in his analysis of cyberspace and representations thereof, “[t]he scale of human perception…no longer operates as an anchor for spatial exploration” (113). Does Google Earth provide a re-anchoring?
The characteristic first move of all Google Earth users is to zoom in on the homespace. From the coldness of outer space to the hub of phenomenological intimacy, Google Earth creates a new cosmology by allowing for a self-positioning within the global totality. We have introduced technologies that enhance perception beyond our natural capacities but nevertheless still seek to articulate these new scales of (outer/inner/cyber) space to our embodied selves. Google Earth has the potential to offer us this articulation. In complicating constructs of scale (for example the local/global divide) by illustrating visually how all sites are continuously interpolated by multiple scales, Google Earth allows for the kind of mapping that would seem to promote alternative cartographic projects. Our mapping of altDurham has been a test of this very possibility.
References:
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. NY: Semiotexte, 1983.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Postmodern Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven
Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 91-110.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991.
Smith, Neil. “Contours of a spatialized politics: homeless vehicles and the production of
geographical space.” Social Text 33: 54-81.
