Geoweb Geospatial Ecosystem
For future reference, I stubbled upon a few interesting posts on the geoweb via Mapping Hacks. This has less to do with the Central New York Region per se, and more to do with how the “geoweb” has the potential of transforming and “regionalizing” the internet. Or as, cholmes posts, Location Matters:
It’s the potential of location to bring the internet out of the virtual and into reality
Update:The New Sense of the Web: click here for a broadcast available on-line from wbur Boston discussing the “geo-spatial web” (originally aired: Tuesday, January 03, 2006)
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Cholmes also links to a document called the headmap manifesto (PDF warning) released in 1999 that explores the potential of locational aware devices and has some interesting nuggets. I copied a few down below.
location aware devices
location aware, networked, mobile devices make possible
invisible notes attached to spaces, places, people and things.
the headmap manifesto articulates the social implications of location
aware devices.
It manifests a world in which computer games move outside and get subversive.
Sex and even love are easier to find.
Real space can be marked and demarcated invisibly.
..what was once the sole preserve of builders, architects and engineers
falls into the hands of everyone: the ability to shape and organise the real world and the real space.
Real borders, boundaries and space become plastic and maleable,
statehood becomes fragmented and global..
Geography gets interesting
Cell phones become internet enabled and location aware, everything in the real world gets tracked, tagged, barcoded and mapped.
spatialising despatialised communities
dislocating:
The internet lowered barriers to long distance communications and made distance and time independent community a real possibility
for anyone with an internet connection.
The cell phone, pagers, email, fax machines, video conferencing, web sites, all enable us to conduct life efficiently at a distance from each other.
Communities can now be founded purely on common interest rather than spatial and temporal proximity.
relocating:
Making sense of local spaces and local communities is a problem that has been almost completely overlooked in all the efforts to make long distance communication easier.
incompleteness
“Although the landscape before my eyes may well herald the features of the one that is hidden behind the hill, it does so only to a certain degree of indeterminacy: here there are meadows, over there perhaps woods, and, in any case, beyond the near horizon, I know only that there will be land or sky and, as far as the limits of the earth’s atmosphere are concerned, I know only that there is, in the most general terms, something to be perceived, and of those remote regions I possess only the style, in the abstract. In the same way, although each past is progressively enclosed in its entirety in the more recent past which has followed it, in virtue of the interlocking of intentionalities, the past degenerates, and the earliest years of my life are lost in the general existence of my body, of which I now know merely that it was already, at that time, confronted by colours and sounds, and a nature similar to the one I now see before me. I possess the remote past, as I do the future, therefore, only in principle, and my life is slipping away from me on all sides, and is circumscribed by impersonal zones. The contradiction which we find between the reality of the world and its incompleteness is the contradiction between the omnipresence of consciousness and its involvement in a field of presence.”M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception