[open-government] [CivicAccess-discuss] How the Internet Reinforces Inequality in the Real World

Thu Feb 7 17:06:22 UTC 2013

I think this is a very useful article that can help us, those involved with
open data, to think more criticaly about social media and its
implications.  It is one thing to map skating rinks, and quite another gun
registries, disappeared aboriginal women, and in the case of this map,
unmapped spaces which tell us much about the socio-economics of data
contributors and little about the space in between.

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Ted Hildebrandt <cdhweb at gmail.com> wrote:

> *How the Internet Reinforces Inequality in the Real World*
>
> Maps have always had a way of bluntly illustrating power. Simply appearing
> on one can be enough to make a place or community matter. Meanwhile,
> absence from "the map" conveys something quite the opposite. Recall 19th
> century colonial surveys of Africa<http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/passages/4761530.0003.007?rgn=main;view=fulltext>with the continent’s vast interior labeled as “unknown.” That one word on
> unmapped territory was simply another way of saying – in the eyes of the
> mapmaker – that the region was of little consequence. Whoever lived there
> didn't matter.
>
> This old idea of paper maps as power brokers offers a good analogy for how
> we might think today about the increasingly complex maps of digital
> information on the physical world that exist in the "geoweb.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoweb>"
> This is where Wikipedia pages and online restaurant reviews and geocoded
> tweets live, all theoretically floating atop the actual cities and
> neighborhoods they describe.
>
> *
> http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2013/02/how-internet-reinforces-inequality-real-world/4602/
> *
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> Ted Hildebrandt
> Director of Social Planning
> Community Development Halton
> 860 Harrington Court
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>
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>
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-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
Post Doctoral Fellow
Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
http://datalibre.ca/
613-234-2805
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