The Best American Travel Writing 2017 by Lauren Collins

Author:Lauren Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Getting lost is a fading phenomenon of a distant past—like pay phones or being unable to call up the lyrics of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song in a heartbeat (“. . . your dreams were your ticket out”). Today, more than fifty years since the Navy built the first suborbital navigation system, our cars, phones, and watches can track our every move using signals from the seventy-plus satellites circling the earth twice a day.

Most people would agree that this is a good thing. It’s comforting to know where you are, to see yourself distilled into a steady blue icon gliding smoothly along a screen. With a finger tap or a short request to Siri or Google Now—which, like other smartphone tools, rely heavily on data from cell towers and Wi-Fi hot spots as well as satellites—a wonderful little trail appears on your device, beckoning you to follow. Tap the icon of a house and you’re guided home from wherever you are. By knowing the most direct route—even one that changes on the fly with traffic conditions—we save time and fuel and avoid hours of frustration. The mass adoption of GPS technology among wilderness users has, it seems, helped make backcountry travel safer. According to the National Park Service, search-and-rescue missions have been dropping, from 3,216 in 2004 to 2,568 in 2014.

The convenience comes at a price, however. There’s the creepy Orwellian fact of Them always knowing where We are (or We always knowing where They are). More concerning are the navigation-fail horror stories that have become legend. Last March, a sixty-four-year-old man is believed to have followed his GPS off a demolished bridge in East Chicago, Indiana, killing his wife. After Nicaraguan troops mistakenly crossed the Costa Rican border in 2010, to stake their nation’s flag on rebel turf they thought was in their country, they blamed the snafu on Google Maps. Enough people have been led astray by their GPS in Death Valley that the area’s former wilderness coordinator called the phenomenon “death by GPS.” The source of the problem there, as in most places, is that apps don’t always have accurate data on closed or hazardous roads. What looks like a bright and shiny path on your phone can in fact be a highway to hell.

Then there’s the bigger question that’s raised when we hear about people like Santillan who, in their total dependence on technology to find their way, venture absurdly off course. What, we wonder, is our now habitual use of navigation tools doing to our minds? An emerging body of research suggests some unsettling possibilities. By allowing devices to take total control of navigation while we ignore the real-world cues that humans have always used to deduce their place in the world, we are letting our natural wayfinding abilities languish. Compulsive use of mapping technology may even put us at greater risk for memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease. By turning on a GPS every time we head somewhere new, we’re also cutting something fundamental

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