When
walking down the street have you ever noticed just how many people stride
purposefully along with their eyes focused almost exclusively on the small
screen of their smart phone held in front of them like some sort of
medieval talisman warding off evil spirits? Oblivious to their surroundings
they plough through crowds, sometimes straight into trees or lamp posts, as they
tap furiously on the phone or check street signs to make sure the computer map
is indeed sending them to Portobello Road and not Penzance.
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| Is this what we're coming to? |
It remains a mystery just what
demands their constant, immediate attention. Remaining in touch with a friend
they haven’t seen for at least 10 minutes? Checking their lottery number,
finding the magic cure for Brexit, resolving the Syrian mess? Or perhaps
they’re anxiously awaiting news on their Oscar nomination or Nobel prize
announcement.
While not wanting to appear like
some old fogey technophobe I do sometimes wonder how the social value of recent
‘triumphs’ like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram improve our lives compared with
the discovery of things like penicillin, polio vaccine, electricity. It’s
interesting that in the search for clean energy we’re going back to the very
basic wind or geothermal sources. Perhaps one day we’ll even figure out how to
harness the tides or develop energy from water.
One innovation that seems to cause
as much confusion as enlightenment is satellite navigation or SatNav. How many
stories have you heard about people relying on SatNav only to wind up in a remote
refuse pit instead of in their friend’s driveway? Once we made the mistake of
using SatNav to find a hotel in Normandy and spent hours creeping around
back roads before discovering that the hotel was less than a mile from where the
device had told us to turn off into the woods.
That experience only reinforced my
prejudice for proper maps. Now before any journey I spend very pleasant hours
in Stanford’s map/travel shop in central London. There you can find beautiful, multi-coloured,
accurate road maps, hiking maps,
ordinance survey maps for almost every location in the world – all of
which you can study at your leisure without that irritating little voice
telling you to turn left in 200 meters, turn right there, and announcing
arrogantly that you have arrived at your destination when a glance out the
window shows that you are instead far from any known destination. Perhaps
SatNav developers should add a phrase like ‘You Can’t Get There From Here.’
These thoughts were wandering
through my head as a recent Greek ferry trip took us past the sometimes-turbulent
strait between the islands of Evia and Andros. This strait is the most direct
route to Troy on the coast of Asia Minor, and I wondered what Odysseus would
have done with a Sat Nav for his famous trip home after the long war. Having made the trip to Troy 10 years
previously he should have known the direct route home to Ithaca. But the gods,
mainly Poseidon, decided to make his life difficult. At least that’s what he
ultimately told his long-suffering wife Penelope.
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| Think she'll buy the faulty SatNav argument? |
In addition to the issues with
Poseidon he decided to add to his problems by relying on the first-generation
SatNav. Instead of the simple, direct route the SatNav directed him to zig-zag around the Aegean and Ionian seas for
10 years constantly being told to turn at the next way point or that he had
arrived at his destination. I wonder if the system would have warned him about
spending several years with Calypso, the risk of the Sirens, the dangers of
Polyphemus, or the problems of a reckless crew that opened the bag of winds. After
many distractions and useless side trips the little, by now almost completely
torn, checkered flag finally appeared at Ithaca. History does not record what
the frustrated Odysseus did with the malfunctioning SatNav. But he probably did
what most of us often think of doing – grind it underfoot before confronting
the wife and son with an already tall tale.
Perhaps now we can blame the trials
of early travellers on a faulty SatNav. One can only speculate how travellers
like Columbus, Magellan, the Vikings and others would have reacted when their SatNav
said it was ‘recalculating’ or that they had ‘arrived at their destination’. They would probably still be floating around the high seas wishing they had relied on tried and tested celestial navigation. At least the stars move in predictable patterns without constantly 'recalculating.'
