Where Are All the People? | Post 25 | Iowa

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Across the USA

5 min readJun 16, 2017

Here’s my little contribution to the debate around Street View, privacy, and Google’s face-blurring technology: There’s nobody on the streets of America anyway!

My route — especially at its current, Midwestern stage — obviously influences the population density of the virtual landscape. I chose to click through What Cheer, Iowa, not Des Moines. So, to be sure, I shouldn’t expect to see people out here:

Elsewhere, though, the feelings of economic emptiness I’ve noted in several posts are often compounded by emptiness of the human variety. Why is it so rare to see farmers milling about their trucks? Or a shopper exiting the only stationary store in town? Really, hardly a soul in the town square? Really, nobody taking a stroll down the street?

Even the active downtowns of more prosperous towns depend on filled parking spots and a vehicle or two in motion to signal life:

Jon Rafman, an artist whose 9-eyes.com project gathers especially dramatic moments from around the Street View world, has noticed something similar, remarking that the demographic actually captured by Street View cameras must be skewed:

At first I saw the camera as totally neutral: It’s just whoever happens to be out gets captured. But the truth is that the neutrality of the camera is actually somewhat . . . there’s hidden ideologies within it. For example, the camera only captures who’s on the street during daylight hours, while most, let’s say, white-collar workers are in their offices somewhere.

Early on during the stretch across Iowa from Wellman to Red Oak, however, I did encounter farmers milling about the truck.

Continuing, I realized that the people I notice in Street View America capture my attention for the solitary figures they strike. It’s very often just one person, maybe two or three, alone in the frame:

Frequently there is something slightly odd about the scene. What exactly are you doing there?, I ask. That’s a un-pedestrian-friendly spot to be walking. Looking for something in the ditch?

Back in New Hampshire I challenged the idea that Street View travel is devoid of human interaction. The isolated and infrequent nature of the people one sees in fact serves to accentuate their presence, focusing the Street View traveler on a particular person’s circumstances. How can you not be drawn in? How can the image not spawn details of their lives?

Surely this is a neighborly catch-up, the man drawing all passers-by into conversation; surely these ladies spend many a work break chatting together:

The trip to the shop aboard the Southern Iowa Trolley must be a highlight of these elderly Iowans’ day. And we can all transport ourselves to a first-person view at Casey’s, arranging our wallet after refueling, on our way back to the truck.

With children, the details speculated by the Street View traveler are as true as those imagined by the child. We can be with the camera, conjuring up their play world, or with the child, spotting the funny Street View car while sprinting across the street to a friend’s house, drawing chalk circles on the sidewalk, and running bikes through the autumn leaves.