Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Google Earth and Complex Interdependence

One of the more difficult concepts to explain to students is the notion of complex interdependence, or the transformation of international relations through economic and political interdependence. Facilitated by globalization, or the widening, deepening, and accelerating of connections among societies, IR theorists like Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye claim complex interdependence accounts for the decline of military force as a policy tool and the increase in economic interdependence. It also means a gradual reduction in the capacity of states to control events.

In an article in the Washington Monthly entitled "The Agnostic Cartographer,"John Gravois provides a fascinating example of complex interdependence, Google Earth:

That new user-generated system of production, married to the technology of searchable “virtual globes” like Google Earth, has given rise to what people have begun calling “neogeography.” In the colonial era, the mapmaker’s imperative was to tame the foreign wilderness with names and boundaries—to discipline a profusion of facts and claims into a narrow and authoritative set of data. Now the profusion of facts and claims is a feature, not a bug. With the ability to zoom in on visual fields of higher and higher resolution, a digital map can contain more and more information—various local names for the same landmark, personal annotations, a picture of someone’s dog in a field. “The modern era was an era of the expectation that every feature should have a single name, and a top-down authority would determine that,” says Goodchild. “I think we’re moving past that with digital technology.” With policies that often favor ambiguity, Google maintains centralized control over the most official features on its maps—national borders, bodies of water, and the like—while in the “community layer” of map information, users have an open canvas. Geography has been democratized.

Powerful states once determined the names of geographic features. Today, even powerful states are forced to ask Google to change how it has chosen to label certain features or to remove the names given to things by its users if they disagree with the geopolitical ramifications.