Whatever Happened to Maps?

The flooding disaster in the Hill Country of Texas early this month generated weeks of news coverage. Stories of tragic deaths and heroic rescues; investigations into the state’s early-warning system; backgrounders on Camp Mystic, the beloved local girls’ camp where 27 young lives were lost; questions about whether budget cuts at the National Weather Service and FEMA were partly to blame. But for all the coverage of the devastation in Texas’s Hill Country, one question went naggingly unanswered.  

Where exactly is Texas’s Hill Country? 

“Central Texas” was the usual shorthand deployed by the news media to describe the devastated area. But where, precisely, in central Texas? How much area does it cover, and where is the closest big city? (San Antonio, about an hour’s drive east.)  What’s the full route of the Guadalupe River, whose overflow caused so much destruction?   

More to the point: whatever happened to maps? 

They used to be a regular feature of newspaper and newsmagazine accounts of disasters, conflicts and other news events, both overseas and domestic. To be sure, we’re still inundated with TV weather maps, with those orange and red swirls indicating where “24 million people are at risk of severe weather.” And yes, there’s the occasional map of Ukraine, updating us on the latest territorial gains by Russian forces, or a few dots on a postage-stamp map of Iran, pinpointing the location of the nuclear facilities targeted in June by U.S. and Israeli bombers.  

But most of the time, we’re left in an abstract, geography-free limbo. The Air India plane that crashed on takeoff, killing 260 passengers a couple of months ago, got saturation news coverage, but I had a hard time finding a map of where in India the plane was taking off from. (Ahmedabad, a city of more than 5 million in the country’s far west.) We got plenty of aerial footage of the tornado devastation in May that flattened the town of London, Ky. — but good luck finding a map showing where in the state the town is located. Five illegal immigrants are sent to the African country of Eswatini; a peace agreement is signed between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda — any chance of a map to let us know where those countries are located, on what most Americans (including Donald Trump) still regard as the “dark continent”? Get your own atlas.

Maps are important. They help make remote events more concrete, situating them in the real world. They can often be a key to understanding a story: Why was Finland so eager to join NATO after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine War? Just look at its 830-mile border with its invasion-threatening neighbor. Maps are, moreover, a continuing-education course in geography, for a generation that is rapidly losing all sense of it. 

I am, I admit, something of a map nerd. I have fond memories of my days making solo road trips around the country: studying my fold-out map (which never seemed to fold back up properly); plotting out my driving route for the day (with room for an improvisational detour or two); pulling into a town at the end of the day and feeling my way to the central business district, the fast-food corridor, the row of chain motels from which I’d pick my nightly rest stop.   

Navigation apps, of course, have made this kind of travel as obsolete as the Model T. Nobody needs to read a map any more, or plot a course, or even to know what direction you’re driving. Simply plug the address into Waze or Google Maps and let the navigation lady guide you there. 

Make no mistake, GPS technology is a miracle of the computer age. I’m in awe of it. Even with its occasional annoying glitches, I depend on it. But it is robbing us of our ability to navigate for ourselves, destroying our sense of place and direction, detaching us from the country around us.  GPS may get us where we’re going — usually faster than we could on our own — but even when we get there, we’re still lost.

I feel the same sort of geographic disconnection every time I settle into my airline seat, only to find that all the window shades have been pulled down for the cross-country trip. Necessary for a better view of the video screen, I suppose. But pretty much a disaster for anyone who wants to keep tabs on the vast, variegated country passing below.

It’s just another manifestation of the insular, isolating age of social media, streaming TV, and “America First.” The algorithms on Netflix and Amazon Prime aim to keep us in a bubble of our own tastes and preferences. Social media strives to make sure we’re exposed only to opinions we already agree with. GPS forces us to follow an approved, pre-determined route — wreaking havoc on our connection to the physical world around us, and all but eliminating any chance of exploration or spontaneity.  

In the hyper-partisan spirit of the Trump era, it’s my way or the highway. The trouble is, in a map-free world, there’s no longer any guarantee we’ll be able to find our way back to the highway.