Location unawareness

As our cars, phones, and computers become more location-aware, do we become less location-aware? What would going "on the road" have meant for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty if their cars had been outfitted with sat-nav screens? Those are among the questions Ari Schulman tackles in his searching essay GPS and the End of the Road in the latest issue of The New Atlantis. Here's a taste: Just as important as what we see in the world is how we go about seeing it. We are adept at identifying points of interest, but pay scant attention to the importance of our approaches to exploring them; our efforts to facilitate the experience of place often end up being self-defeating. What [Walker] Percy's strategies aim to do, in part, is to put the traveler into a state of willingness and hunger to encounter the world as it is, to discover the great sights with the freshness, the newness, that is so much of what we seek from them. Alain de Botton also describes this attitude as the solution to the guidebook problem, and identifies it as the mode of receptivity. Practices like geocaching and geotagging rely on this receptivity. Geocaching asks the...