Reflection
Project 4: Digital Mapping
Google Maps is another example of the amazing advancements our culture has reached technologically. When on “street view”, Google Maps allows anyone to view what a location looks like in real life, changing what companies can and cannot hide from you. Up until this invention, people were only able to see what the land or building owners had put out on their websites; obviously biased views of the location. Now, more or less, we are able to transcend this biased view; in this way Google Maps can be viewed as a hacking device. In the essay “Hacker Politics and Publics”, Coleman explains how “hacking, (often misunderstood as the practice of a deviant subculture) in fact reveals the continuing relevance, if also the contradictions, of the liberal tradition to the digital present.” Referencing this same liberal belief is Winner’s essay about cyber libertarianism. Winner defines cyber libertarianism as “a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing, libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics in the years to come”. With the digital world constantly evolving and advancing, it becomes harder and harder to maintain a grasp over boundaries between personal freedom and personal privacy.
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