With this week’s readings on Mapping, I reflected on the digital maps I use everyday. In one trip to meet up with friends at a new restaurant, I may open Apple Maps on my phone to see what street the restaurant is on and which route I need to take, what the weather looks like for the next few hours, and whether or not public transportation is on time or delayed. The maps on my phone allow me to consider all of this in the five minutes before I head out the door.

In “How to Lie with Maps,” Mark Monmonier describes the three attributes (i.e., scale, projection, and symbolization) maps are comprised of. In considering my regular use of these tools, symbols proved the most relevant, at least on the surface. All of them use shape, orientation, and hue in a number of ways.

• Apple Maps: There are symbols to classify different vehicles or modes of transportation, places of interest, routes, color/hue for traffic density, to name a few. Apple maps provides a ratio scale that adjusts as you zoom or rotate the map, although as a non-driver in New York City, I less frequently think in distance, rather defaulting to “stops” as my unit of measurements, even though those are not standard.
• Accuweather: Weather apps use a variety of symbolic elements to convey information. One of the most noticeable for this subject is color, as it relates to precipitation. The app I use provides four different color spectrums to indicate the severity of four different types of precipitation: rain, snow, ice, and mix. To Apple’s credit, if your directions include public transportation, it tells you how many stops you need to travel on a particular line.
• NYC Subway: The colored subway lines can act as indicators and abstractions, a quick point of reference if, like me, you forget which lettered trains provide express service, but know you take a yellow line to and from The Graduate Center. On top of that, colored service alerts indicate good service or delays.

What I’m not considering in the five minutes before I leave my apartment, are the ways the information I’m presented is influenced by outside forces, accessibility of the symbols I’m interpreting, and the convenience afforded to me by living in the West.

• First, businesses and other entities don’t automatically appear on these platforms. The three most used navigation applications, Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps, which combined occupy 95% of audience reach, have mechanisms in place for businesses to make themselves visible, all by way of marketing or advertisement. Google and Apple require business owners to create profiles via their respective services, and then use a variety of criteria to rank which businesses are displayed to users. Waze requires customers to pay to place adds that pop up as destinations on a map a users drive by. In these cases, English proficiency, access to internet enabled technology, and cost, among other things, act as barriers and restrict what is and isn’t a “place of interest.”
• Red and green feature prominently as symbols, often working at ends of a spectrum, indicating the severity of precipitation, the quality of train service, and the status of traffic congestion on the roads. It is also the most common type of color vision discrepancy.
• In “Dividing Lines,” Mayukh Sen highlights the disparity in utility of these tools and their failure to capture the landscape of former colonies, often in the Global East or Global South, in a way that effectively renders them unimportant. In a time where everything feels like it’s at our fingertips, enabled by the internet, exclusion is dangerous because the phenomenon persists despite the common notion that the internet has charted everything. This reinforces the impacts and ideals of colonialism by rendering what is covered, often in the West or in English speaking areas, visible and the rest untraceable.

As I traveled around town this weekend, I tried to consider where I encountered maps, how I used them, and what their limits were. I would love to hear, or discuss in class, others’ observations.