Let me earn your trust right away by telling you I have no plans on being coy. You will read nothing here hinting at finding your cosmic purpose. Navigation in this essay is a literal term. Think of digital map applications, global positioning systems, and finding your way to physical locations. Now that we are on the same page of the atlas, we can proceed.
The 800-Foot Panic
Have you ever found yourself living out the following scenario? You’re plugged into Waze, Google Maps, or your favorite map-app, moments away from your destination. Perhaps you are less than a mile away. Knowing you’re fairly close to where you want to go, you start to concentrate more intently on what the map-app is telling you. A half mile to go. Now a quarter. Now twelve hundred feet. Now eight hundred feet. Internally there is a mild panic. Will I miss my turn? How far is eight hundred feet anyway?
After a blur of panic and a few quick seconds of trying to do a mental distance-times-rate-equals-time calculation, you decide to stop looking at the app and glance at the road in front of you. Suddenly, you see enough signs not only to get you to your destination, but also to lead Dorothy from Kansas to the Land of Oz and back home again. It’s at this moment that you go duh... maybe if I just read a little and depend less on the app, I can avoid this next time.
If this has happened to you, don’t feel bad. These days we’re all victims of hypermedia. A working definition of hypermedia in this context is “the habit of letting digital tools act as an unnecessary middleman, replacing our own physical effort, attention, and instincts.” Keep in mind that this is a working definition, so please tell the Merriam-Webster police no charges are necessary.
I first learned the term hypermedia when a quirky professor of mine spent quite a few minutes fiddling with a projector so that he might show us a chart he had on a piece of paper. After struggling with the technology for a few minutes and apologizing to the class about his lack of technical prowess, he had a breakthrough. And let me tell you, it was a real lulu. Looking at the class of about twelve seated at a large round conference table, he realized he didn’t need the projector at all. He could simply hold the piece of paper up so we all could see it, or really push the envelope and merely have each student review it, then pass it to the next. We all laughed about the mishap, and that’s when he told us he had fallen victim to a condition that he often rails against called hypermedia.
Another term that gets at this is autoamputation (one of Marshall McLuhan’s gems). This is where the cognitive processes usually employed to complete a task are replaced by technology. In other words, a technology is introduced and adopted, and as a result, it automatically amputates the portion of your brain that used to hold that function. Think of calculators being used to count.
Map-apps are notorious for cultivating this condition. They let us outsource our personal geospatial skills to an application (software running on our phone or in our cars). It gets us from point A to B with little to no mental strain on our part. It’s like autopilot, but instead, it’s an auto-navigator. We reason: I don’t want to think about east or west, read road signs, or figure out whether the highway or backstreets are backed up based on time of day. I want to plug in my destination and have it tell me the optimal route to get there. Is that too much to ask?
“Are We There Yet?”
Well, if you’ve been around for a while like me, you know it didn’t use to be like this. We didn’t always have the benefit of satellites or global positioning to know where we were standing on Earth at any given moment, or an approximate ETA for every destination. Who doesn’t remember going on a road trip with their parents, maybe on a bus or in a car, passing out somewhere along the way, then waking up and having no earthly idea where you were? The reason we asked “Are we there yet?” was because we didn’t have the slightest clue where we were. If we were in a totally unfamiliar place, we couldn’t even know if we were close to there, let alone there, there.
Usually, if you asked that question and your parent wasn’t the type to tell you to shut up and go back to sleep, they would tell you how much longer in terms of time: “Oh, we probably have another 45 minutes or so.” Or “maybe an hour or so”. If they added the word “good” to the beginning of the time frame, you knew it was trending over, rather than under, the estimate. I don’t remember my Dad or a bus driver saying something like, “Yeah, we have about 38 miles to go.” Not to say we never discussed miles, but rather we knew it was easier to digest the distance if the time was given instead.
That’s how people used to give directions: in time and signs. Signs include landmarks such as an abandoned strip mall or a vacated fast-food restaurant. A conversation between a lost person and a Good Samaritan might go like this:
Lost Person: How do you get to the Piggly Wiggly?
Good Samaritan: Oh, that’s a ways, but if you drive about 5 minutes down this road here past the old Burger King on your right, you’ll run into the highway going south. Take that 3 minutes or so, and you’ll see the signs for the Piggly Wiggly on your left.
The lost person would then try to execute the task based on that information, using every cognitive muscle they could muster to remember something like: Go past the old Burger King. Piggly Wiggly signs on my right...
That was it. That’s how you got directions.
The funny thing is that this has worked phenomenally since humans began traveling long enough distances that we needed to ask someone how to get there. Stagecoach travel would tell you it’s a day’s ride; same thing with railroads. I’m sure when ancient humans needed directions to lands far away, they talked in terms of sunrises, sunsets, big rocks, trees, bodies of water, and perils to avoid so that you might get to where you want to go.
Kids nowadays don’t need to ask “Are we there yet?” if they’re capable of reading and seeing the interactive map on the dashboard. Do they? Or, if you’re raising a real future efficiency expert, they’ve probably asked you to share the destination’s address so they have it as well, right on their own handheld navigational tool. Thereby, they always know where on earth they are.
I would not say this spells the end of childhood, because a simple remedy exists: everyone, not just the kid, turns their phones off and uses maps instead, even if for a single car ride or road trip. Childhood restored. See how easy that was?
Raging Against the Application
I think the much bigger problem here might be us—or maybe just me, working with an autoamputated sense of space and time because I’ve become too reliant on map-apps to get places. It’s me realizing that navigation isn't something we should outsource all the time if we want our thinking caps to fit when we need them. It’s me, and really all of us, realizing that a map-app isn't something you argue with in a literal sense about the best route to take. If you prefer to take the way you’ve always taken, simply disregard it when it tells you, "In 1,200 feet turn right on Main Street to save 3 minutes," as if it can predict the future. If it gives you more lip and you have a pretty good idea where you are going, simply shut it off and cancel its contract for the rest of the ride. It is strangely empowering when you show the software who’s boss.
But if you want to go full punk rock and really rage against the application, dare to take a road trip with nothing but a map and the desire to go somewhere, anywhere. Don’t know where that is, but know you’ll find your way home when you’re ready. Obviously, if you have a family, you might want to take them with you as well.
That single act for a day (or maybe a few short trips over a few days) can begin the reconditioning of our navigational muscles. Soon enough, we may even find ourselves strong enough to be in the driver’s seat, which is where we belong when we are the only ones who know where we ultimately want to go. Not in a grand cosmic sense— unless your destiny awaits you five minutes up the road, past the old Burger King.