THE WEB AND THE EXAGGERATED DEMISE OF GEOGRAPHY

The Internet is, in theory, non-geographical. It defies the concept of location. To mail a letter, you need to indicate a certain address for yourself and your recipient. But you can send an e-mail—or surf the Web—anywhere you can plug in a computer.

Some have hailed our newfound ability to dissolve our terrestrial bonds, using what Quentin Schultze calls "cyber-rhetoric about conquering space." In his bookHabits of the High-Tech Heart, Schultze quotes futurist Thornton May as saying, "Geography is dead. … By the year 2008, technology will have trivialized the concept of place."

When I registered recently at the site www.geourl.org, I was struck by how wrongheaded May's pronouncement seems to be. Web sites such as this one celebrate, illuminate, and revere geography in a way that was not done before the Internet. Never before have people had such access to such resources to measure and explore the dimensions of physical space. Besides, the awe of our ability to connect digitally requires something meaningful to connect in the first place. If, as May foresees, we evolve into a singular, generic cosmopolitan world, it won't really matter whether we talk to someone down the block or across the globe—everyone will think and act essentially the same. Until then, the allure of sending an e-mail to Paris or dialing up a map of the Amazon River makes global communication enticing.

GeoURL tries to literally map the Web. Visitors register their personal or commercial Web sites according to their latitude and longitude on the globe. For example, I registered my personal weblog from downtown Chicago at 41.9 degrees latitude and -87.6 degrees longitude. These coordinates now appear in the code of my weblog. Now that I've registered, I can view the GeoURL listings closest to my coordinates, or search other cities.

While this is potentially fascinating, the database is very cursory at this point, limiting its appeal. The first few URL neighbors of mine that turn up include an Asian restaurant a few blocks away, a hair stylist, a Web design company, and a dour personal weblog that hasn't been updated in over a year. The listings are merely randomly useful, not to mention randomly proportional; inexplicably, Los Angeles has the same number of listings as my hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich.

Still, finding my latitude and longitude is a rewarding exercise I hadn't tried since elementary school, and GeoURL helps out by linking to several resources that pin down your location. The most reliable is the Acme Mapper, which returns coordinates, a satellite photo and a topographical chart when you enter a zip code. For example, here's a bird's-eye view of my apartment building, and here's Christianity Today's headquarters in the suburbs. Here's Manhattan, the Hoover Dam, and other prominent locations (warning: this is a lunch break killer).

A related online phenomenon is the clustering of personal weblogs around physical regions. NYCbloggers.com and Chicagobloggers.com organize blogs according to subway maps, and similar sites cluster bloggers in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C.,  Dallas/Fort Worth, and other cities. Rather than blurring the concept of place, in many ways the Web is enhancing it.

Earlier:
-God, Google and geography
        -Towards a new world Atlas

Related:
-Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge by David  Livingstone (review forthcoming in the May/June issue of B&C)
-"Nurturing Virtue in Community," Chapter 7 of Habits of the High-Tech Heart
-Being Rural by Nicholas Negroponte in Wired

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Chicago Tribune:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan film director Siddiq Barmak will never forget the moment he first caught sight of the grubby little street girl who would go on to star in his Golden Globe-winning movie "Osama." … As he scoured the dusty sidewalk for suitable faces, he felt a tug at his sleeve, looked down, and found himself staring into the biggest, saddest eyes he had ever seen. He knew instantly that this was the girl he had been looking for. … "Her eyes told the stories of pain that are the stories of Afghanistan," he said. … Marina Golbahari, then 12 … won worldwide acclaim for her performance as the girl who dresses as a boy to circumvent the Taliban's ban on female employment. "Osama" was Afghanistan's first feature film since the Taliban regime was toppled, and in January it became the first Afghan film to win a Golden Globe, for best foreign film. … For Marina, who had spent most of her life scratching a living on the streets of Kabul, dodging the Taliban police, it was not a difficult role to play. … For the first four days of filming … Marina was terrified of the camera, which she took for some kind of weapon, and she shrank in fear whenever he pointed it her way. "I thought he was trying to kill me," she says, laughing now at the memory as she sipped tea at the one-room mud house she shares with 11 members of her family.

LANSING, Mich. — Selling Oldsmobiles has been Leo Jerome's life for four decades. One of the dealerships he owns sold 5,000 Olds models in a single year. Last month the 61-year-old Jerome suffered through the brutal indignity of selling one Oldsmobile. Just one. … Businesses collapse all the time and, as history has shown, so do car manufacturers—Studebaker, Packard, Nash, Hudson . … Some, like the Cluts, never—and perhaps thankfully—made it into production. But in Lansing, the hometown of Oldsmobile, the car's passing into the realm of memories and museums is painful. T-shirts boast that the wondrous mechanical creation of Ransom E. Olds predated Chevy, Dodge and Ford. Prominent landmarks, like the downtown home of minor league baseball's Lansing Lugnuts, bear the Oldsmobile name. Oldsmobile was the first mass-produced car with an automatic transmission. It was the first with a speedometer and the first modern car with front-wheel drive. President Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1907 visit to Lansing, rode down Michigan Avenue toward what is now Michigan State University in a 1907 2-cylinder REO. … Now Oldsmobile, once the nation's fourth-largest automaker, is the oldest carmaker to fold.

WEEKLY DIGEST

• What does the soul weigh? The recent film 21 Grams thinks it has the answer. So did the early 20th century doctor Duncan MacDougall, who established the weight of the soul as a scientific "fact" after elaborate but dubious measurements of how much weight human and canine bodies lose at death. Unfortunately, MacDougall's work is marred by "the poor accuracy of his scales, the huge variability in his data, the all-too-few people studied, [and] the tricky skill of pinpointing the exact time of death," says the Melbourne Age. That didn't stop MacDougall from publishing his findings in 1907, the same year Einstein put forth the more reliable E=mc2. While the body does indeed decrease in weight as it decomposes, MacDougall's belief that humans suddenly lose three fourths of an ounce with the departure of their soul does not, says the Age, carry any weight. Full story
• The latest review of The DaVinci Code is in. Senator John Edwards said in a television interview last fall that he had just finished the novel and thought it was a "great book." Edwards' favorite book is The Trial of Socrates, said Bookselling This Week last month in a report on books that presidential candidates have read and written. Senator John Kerry has reportedly polished off Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. Governor Howard Dean had cited Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and David McCullough's Truman as two of his favorites before bowing out of the race. President Bush's favorites include a biography of Sam Houston and a book on the unintended consequences of 1960s liberalism. Dennis Kucinich was poring over a collection of Bush's "lies" about Iraq in preparation for a showdown with the president, despite the widespread perception that Kucinich, author of A Prayer for America, didn't have a prayer. Full story

Related: George Will's 28 questions for John Kerry

• So much for fair ball. The New York Yankees' trade for Alex Rodriguez last week put to rest the theory of the bestselling Moneyball by Michael Lewis, which explained how the Oakland A's built a playoff contender on a tight budget by relying on scouting smarts. Two years later, the wealthier teams are using all of the same "sabermetric" tricks as the smaller franchises, and the gap between them is growing, says Aaron Schatz in The New Republic online. The real loser in the A-Rod trade, he says, is not Boston, which will probably still make the playoffs, but Toronto, which has even less to work with to battle the Yankees. Full story

Earlier:
Bill James and sabermetrics (fifth item)

• Miscellaneous:Why don't drug companies make many drugs? From the New Yorker - What exactly is a meme? From the Chicago Reader - What you can learn from car ads, from the National Journal - On street lamps and lost gloves in New York City, from the New Yorker - Happy birthday, Washington Monument, from the Washington Post
• Update: I blogged recently about time and consciousness. Here's a relevant recent piece from the Boston Review on the brain, belief, and behavior. And here's a permalink to a New Year's Day op-ed in the New York Times entitled "The Time We Thought We Knew."

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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.