Doing Google Maps: Everyday Use and the Image of Space in a Surveillance Capitalism Centrepiece

Gentzel, Peter; Wimmer, Jeffrey; Schlagowski, Ruben

doi:10.14361/dcs-2021-070208

Doing Google Maps: Everyday Use and the Image of Space in a Surveillance Capitalism Centrepiece

Authors :

Gentzel, Peter

Wimmer, Jeffrey

Schlagowski, Ruben

Abstract

The article focuses on the app Google Maps. In structural terms, Google Maps is committed to the production logic of platform or sur- veillance capitalism, insofar as the collected user data are utilised both to maintain Google Maps as a “cartographic infrastructure” (Plantin 2018) and to predict and manipulate behaviour (Zuboff 2019). On the other hand, Google Maps presents an “image of the world” that, as a product of platform capitalism, also conveys specific notions that we depict by using the concepts of “networked images” or “operational images” (Farocki 2004; Rubinstein & Sluis 2008). First, we traced the development of Google Maps and classified it using cartographic principles and criteria. Building on that, we per- formed two empirical studies. In a first step, we highlight findings on the everyday usage practices of Google Maps. In a second step, we characterise city maps produced by residents of a medium-sized city in Germany using an app developed by us. The project thus sheds light on the appropriation aspect of Google Maps and, by exploring the micro- level of individual usage practices, knowledge, and skills, provides an empirical contribution that is comparatively rare in the context of platform studies. Developing a map application furthermore enables us to show that the selection of knowledge and its spatial anchoring – the “image of the world”– follows a different logic when certain indi- viduals create a map for specific locations (e.g., multimodal routes to “hidden culture”).