Giving, and following, driving directions was an art. A cartographic communication, conveyed and conducted by spoken description, verbal transcription, and subsequent decipherment. You asked for a route to a destination, and your partner in navigation issued a list of waypoints, landmarks, and driving instructions; you wrote these down (or bravely, committed them to memory); then, as you drove, you compared those descriptions with actual, physical reality, checking to see if a useful correspondence obtained; then, ideally, you glided ‘home.’ A successful navigation was occasion for celebration by both direction-giver and direction-follower; hermeneutical encounters like theirs deserved no less; before, there was the unknown space, forbidding and inscrutable; afterwards, there was a destination, magically clarified, made visible, and arrived at. There were evaluative scales here to be found: some were better at giving directions than others, their sequence of instructions clear and concise, explicit specifications expertly balanced by exclusion of superfluous, confusing detail; not all were equally proficient at following directions, some mental compasses were easily confused by turns and intersections, some drivers’ equanimity was easily disturbed by difficult traffic and a missed exit or two. (Reading and making maps, of course, has always been a honorable and valuable skill in our civilizations.)
Which reminds us that driving while trying to navigate was often stressful and sometimes even dangerous (sudden attempts to take an exit or avoid taking one cause crashes all the time.) The anxiety of the lost driver has a peculiar phenomenological quality all its own, enhanced in terrifying ways by the addition of bad neighborhoods, fractious family members, darkness, hostile drivers in traffic. And so, Global Positioning System (GPS) navigators–with their pinpoint, precise, routes colorfully, explicitly marked out–were always destined to find a grateful and receptive following. An interactive, dynamic, realistic, updated in real-time map is a Good Thing, even if the voices in which it issued its commands and directions were sometimes a little too brusque or persistent.
But as has been obvious for a long time now, once you start offloading and outsourcing your navigation skills, you give them away for good. Dependency on the GPS is almost instantaneous and complete; very soon, you cannot drive anywhere without one. (Indeed, many cannot walk without one either.) The deskilling in this domain has been, like many others in which automation has found a dominant role, quite spectacular. Obviously, I speak from personal experience; I was only too happy to rely on GPS navigators when I drive, and now do not trust myself to follow even elementary verbal or written driving directions. I miss some of my old skills navigating skills, but I do not miss, even for a second, the anxiety, frustration, irritation, and desperation of feeling lost . An older set of experiences, an older part of me, is gone, melded and merged with a program, a console, an algorithm; the blessing is, expectedly, a mixed one. Over the years, I expect this process will continue; bits of me will be offloaded into an increasingly technologized environment, and a newer self will emerge.
Samir Chopra 