Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps

Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps explores the mundane act of navigating cities in the age of digital mapping infrastructures. 

Noone navigates the frictions routing through Google Maps’ brand of location awareness and its categorizing and classifying of spatial information. Complicating the assumption that Google Maps distorts a sense of direction based on how it represents space, Noone argues that Google Maps’ location awareness is based on misrepresentations of public service, access, readability, and precision. At the same time, the book illustrates the ordinary ways people are challenging and refusing this vision of the world. Drawing on an arts-based field study that took place in the streets of London, New York, London, Toronto and Amsterdam, Noone uses street level encounters to open lines of inquiry about the production of computationally legible cities that reflect Silicon Valley’s ideological narrative of urban life as ahistorical, apolitical, and without disparity, inequality, and barriers.

Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps will be essential reading for information studies and media studies scholars and students with an interest in embodied information practices, critical information studies, and critical data studies. The book will also appeal to an urban studies audience engaged in work on the digital city and the datafication of urban environments.