Google and the Architecture of Knowledge Part One

{should have been posted on Wednesday, May 20}

Two months after the launch of Google Streetview in the UK and the Netherlands I got photographed in the streets of Delft by a google Streetcar while on my forthdaily run today. I saluded the the car with an expressive jump and a grimace and got reminded by a bunch of giggling schoolgirls shouting from their bikes that I will be made inrecognizable.

I wonder if a expressively jumping guy with an orange basketball pant is inrecognizable. Indeed Google has run into problems with privacy advocates and authorities around the world, pictures had to be blurred, removed or retaken. The hunt for the top ten strangest Street View pictures and speculations about the stories behind them has long started.

If we understand mapping as an abstract representation of reality then we might question if Street View - understood as geotagged, systematically shot panoramic images - technically still counts as such or if new definitions of mapping are needed. Google does not only blur faces and carplates, they also blur the border between three dimensional representation, and momentary snapshots of reality. Street View is just another step in the company's successful conquest of a seamless inclusion of preferably all information types of varying privacy into one enormous interactive database.

One recalls Deborah Hauptman's remark in David Harvey's book "Condition of Postmodernity" that local information and means no longer are necessary to map a region and that mapping is related to power aspiration. Spatial information is now gathered by satelites and a technologically equipped car, exceeding the precision of a local geometrician. A private company measures the entire world much more efficient than any public institution has ever been cabable of.

Instead of continuing on a path of criticism it is more interesting to observe the development of seamless integration. Still, the 3D city model and the 360 views are two mutually integrated but separate representations, interconnected with a cinematographically dramatized fly-in/out camera shot. Will the barrier between the two representations eventually fall? Is the panoramic image with integrated hyperlinks just another small step towards an ever higher resolution of the mediatized world?