Navigational Atrophy > Anxiety over losing our sense of direction
The Feels Guide is a field guide to internet emotion — new feelings, moody machines, emotional design, and wherever, whenever, however emotion and technology mix and mingle.
Navigational atrophy is the real decline of spatial cognition and the equally real apprehension about a loss of sensory awareness.
🔑 DEFINITION
Anxiety that the human sense of direction may be permanently altered by use of digital maps.
See also: Anticipatory grief, death by GPS, automation bias
📜 A BRIEF HISTORY
The anxiety that humans are losing their navigational capabilities because of global positioning system devices (GPS) dates back to at least 2003, when Wired pointed out that campers were relying too heavily on the technology.
Since the 2010s news stories about death by GPS have become commonplace. Humans put too much trust in the automated system, ignoring their own observations or sense of direction.
After 2015, more experts started to worry that people are losing the ability to navigate for themselves and that we will be unable to cope when it fails. Neuroscience research circa 2020 shows that GPS use does have a negative impact on spatial memory.
Automation bias, or the propensity for people to favor suggestions by automated decision-making systems, extends beyond the territory of GPS. Over-reliance on systems in intensive care units, nuclear power plants, and aircraft cockpits can lead to life or death errors.
Post-2020, people are turning to maps for more than directions, realizing that we exist in the map rather than outside of it (as with paper maps). Apple and Google maps are actively humanizing the experience of place with Flyovers, Live Views, and vibe checks for neighborhoods.
💗 EXPERIENCE
One way people cope with uncomfortable emotions is to meme about it. A quick survey of GPS memes shows the range of complicated feelings prompted by GPS.
- Fear of following GPS blindly off a cliff, into a lake, through a wall
- Frustration at “rerouting”
- Defiance by going off the suggested route
- Competitive pride in trying to beat the projected time
- Annoyance when GPS interrupts your favorite song or a conversation
- Outrage at the GPS voice bossing you around
- Apprehension at allowing maps (and other people) know your location
It’s not all unhappy feelings though.
- There’s comfort in having maps as a backup even if you know your way
- The thrill of discovering crowdsourced wisdom for new places
- Amusement at finding candid moments
- A tinge of nostalgia at revisiting old haunts
- The mischievous joy at uploading cursed images
🎉 FUN FACT
Almost all maps — Waze, Apple Maps, Mapquest, Here WeGo — default to the most efficient route from point A to point B. What if you want to take the road less traveled? Well, there’s a (m)app for that! The Roadtrippers app finds the most scenic route and even lets you organize point-by-point kind of like the old-school style like the AAA TripTiks.
🎩 PERSONS OF INTEREST
Daniele Quercia and Luca Maria Aiello, researchers at Nokia Bell Labs in Cambridge, and Rossano Schifanella, Professor at the University of Turin, created Happy Maps. The project looked at what would make city life more enjoyable and mapped it using crowdsourcing and geo-tagged pictures. Good City Life collected other sensory maps for smells and sounds, too, and is the long-long precursor to Google’s neighborhood vibe feature.
💡 BIG PICTURE
Our internal GPS is changing. On this, geographers, psychologists, anthropologists and neurologists agree. Handheld navigational devices have been linked to lower spatial cognition, poorer wayfinding skills, and reduced environmental awareness.
It’s not all for the worst though. Having maps can help us to feel supported in situations where we feel uncertain, like traveling in a new city, or even vulnerable, like walking after dark in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Digital exploration can lead to physical exploration. And it can mean greater independence for people with disabilities too.
Instead, we can look at GPS as a way to supplement, rather than replace, our spatial awareness. As long as we can still tune in to the sensory information we pick up from the world around us, we can avoid some of the pitfalls. And it might be good to remember that sometimes it is okay to get a little lost.
🤔 LEARN MORE
- Read about the sweet nostalgia for a childhood home frozen in time or the bitter disappointment of discovering its loss
- Learn how street views of Paradise, CA before the 2018 Camp Fire can give us a sense of climate grief and longing for the before times
- Watch TikToker and professional Google Maps player @georainbolt (aka Trevor Rainbolt) find anything in the world from a Google Street View photo
- Find out where Google Maps is headed next
- Do a deep dive on Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World where M.R. O’Connor still finds hope despite our reliance on GPS
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That’s all the feels for this week!
xoxo
Pamela 💗
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The guide behind the guide
I’m Pamela Pavliscak, a tech emotionographer who studies emotion on the internet. I’m writing a book, All the Feels (Algonquin, 2024), about how technology is changing our emotional life — mostly for the better. I run an emotion tech consultancy called Subjective Labs and teach emotional design at the Pratt Institute in NYC. And I’m starting to share what I learn here and on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter.
