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GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost
Around two years ago, Shachar Maidenbaum, a neuroscientist who studies spatial navigation at Ben-Gurion University, in Israel, drove north with his children to visit a friend. He was following his location on G.P.S., using the Waze app for directions, when an automated voice suddenly told him to turn left and drive roughly two hundred miles south. “I thought, What? I’m driving north. What’s going on?,” he told me. “Then I realized: my phone thinks I’m in Beirut.” Israel often jams G.P.S. signals as a military strategy, and in recent years it has employed “spoofing,” a technique that sends fake location data to G.P.S.-enabled devices. Some pilots and ship captains in the region have had to disable automated safety systems as a result.
Maidenbaum, who frequently asks research participants to find their way in virtual-reality experiments, was now facing his own navigational challenge. His friend had told him about a move from one address, near some train tracks, to a new one, so he decided to drive to the center of the correct town and find the tracks. After following them to his friend’s old street, he tried navigating based on his friend’s description of the move. He eventually made it to his destination, but the experience heightened his awareness of our new relationship to physical places. “For the first time, we have a society which is heavily reliant on G.P.S.,” Maidenbaum told me. “What happens when it goes away?”
The Global Positioning System was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in the nineteen-seventies, and the first known G.P.S.-equipped bombs were dropped during the Persian Gulf War, in 1991. When civilians were first given access to the technology, it was only to lesser versions, but in 2000 the U.S. decided to make the same G.P.S. signals available to everyone. Within a decade or so, there were a billion G.P.S. receivers in use around the world. Most had nothing to do with the military, according to Katherine Dunn, the author of the new book “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.” A military technology had become an invisible guiding hand in our lives. “It’s like we’re all using bazookas to order delivery,” Dunn told me.
Satellite navigation depends on a process called trilateration. A receiver—whether in a cell phone, a smart watch, or a vehicle’s navigation system—generally fields signals from at least four satellites. It can calculate distance from the satellites by measuring the time it takes for each signal to arrive. With this information, the receiver can locate itself. The American navigation system has been joined by similar networks from the European Union, Russia, and China, and together they provide a reliable answer to the question Where am I?
For centuries, getting lost was a major preoccupation—something that could prove life-changing, even life-ending. We wouldn’t have the Odyssey if the ancient Greeks had had G.P.S.; fairy tales might never have warned readers to stay on the path when walking through the forest. In a nineteenth-century study of people’s fears, conducted by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, an entire section is dedicated to “losing orientation.” Hall notes that a twelve-year-old suffers from “the constant fear of losing the points of compass in city or country,” while a twenty-year-old “awakes in anguish till she knows which way is north.”
Lately, I’ve been unnerved to notice how differently I move through the world on account of technology. In a foreign city, instead of situating myself by reading signs or scanning for landmarks, I’ll open Google Maps and wait for my blue dot to settle—as though the dot, instead of me, is finding its bearings. Last month, on my way to a doctor’s appointment in Manhattan, I saw that my dot was a few blocks south of me; even though I was in the right place, I slowed down until it caught up, and when it did I felt inexplicably comforted. During hikes, I’ve grown accustomed to keeping track of my exact location on the AllTrai