Long live Ira Glass

This American Life covers a pretty broad spectrum in its Mapping episode–establishing a relationship to the world through each of the five senses.

Denis Wood seemed like the most interesting boring guy ever–who knew mapping the neighborhood could be so inspiring. No doubt an intelligent guy, Wood describes his visual mapping of the individual elements of his neighborhood as the “poetics of cartography,” sharing his dream of maps that give his world a spatial character. At one point during their conversation, host Ira Glass seems to take a step back, realizing the seeming absurdity of Wood’s desire to map items throughout the neighborhood as specific as pumpkins. But to counter Wood romanticizes his meticulous mapmaking in the form of an epic quest for the holy grail–a map to end all maps that will “realize the potential of the whole thing.” While I initially thought the idea of Wood’s maps was humorous, I eventually found myself entirely convinced that he is justified in that quest. Prehaps its because of one of the points that comes up in the interview: maybe the map does more than just indicate something about the existing world. It transcends, somewhere along the line, its symbolic nature and becomes a reality in itself. Though I’m not into video games as much as I used to be, I feel like I can relate to the visual map from the perspective of the gamer–a relationship whose integrity in the virtual world is a matter of life or death.

Indeed, from the bird’s-eye-view world of The Legend of Zelda for NES, to the all-important radar map of Goldeneye for N64, to the togglable 3d maps of some first person shooters, video games are all about maps. While these virtual scenarios seem trivial,  research has shown that video games can actually increase spatial awareness in the real world, at least in women. Which would seem to go back to the idea of the map (and isn’t a video game just a complex, interactive map?) becoming, or offering something more than just indication to something in the real world. Interesting.