Use of GPS is off the charts: Would we be lost without them?
Afew years ago, deciding to give new-fangled technology a go, we borrowed our neighbours GPS gizmo to drive a long, long stretch of highway that I could have driven in my sleep or with my hands tied behind my back, not that I have actually done either.
After endless kilometres of silence, Ms. GPS excitedly sparked to life, and in a tone reminiscent of one’s sternest of grade school teachers, commanded us to “turn here, turn here.” Had we obeyed the satellite’s earthly robotic servant, we would have turned on to a gravel road to what would be accurately described as nowhere and quite possibly our doom and headlines in the Journal de Montréal.
Later that same year, in the depths of winter, a young doctor from Sherbrooke, similarly equipped with a GPS for a trip to New Brunswick, confidently followed the device’s directions and ended up stranded in the snow on a logging road in the wilds of the Miramachi, 100 km off course. She survived for three days on a cooler of food her mother had packed before being happened upon by snowmobilers.
The moral of these aborted tragedies, according to GPS apologists, is, tut tut, you didn’t read the manual. If you HAD, you’d have learned that you have to change the machine’s settings to ignore unpaved roads. So, where’s that manual again?
To be fair, your scribe recently successfully availed himself of the services of a cell phone GPS app to navigate a confusing network of connections heading for a destination in the remote reaches of Charlesbourg. Ignoring Ms. GPS’S often comical phonetic interpretation of French street names - “turn left on Boulevard Reen Leave-ess-cue” - one must admit the thing has its advantages.
GPS has become an essential tool for ordinary folks and is now almost a standard feature for cars and trucks. It’s a massive industry, with $155 billion US in global revenues projected for 2020, still growing strong despite the pandemic, and estimated to grow to $227 billion US by 2027.
Of course, the price of finding one’s way efficiently is a disturbing invasion of privacy, just like anything associated with the internet. A tiny example of the pervasiveness of this fearful data collection is the cheery little records of your monthly travels Google Maps sends you. Look where you’ve been and where We have been following you!
With the invasion of GPS we are losing our cherished dependence on maps. We have a collection of maps in a box somewhere from places we’ve been over the years. Some places may have changed so much to have rendered the maps useless, but still they are fond souvenirs of cities we’ve visited and spent hours trying to figure out where we were and how to find our car.
The GPS, naturally, has driven map sales off a cliff. According to several reports the market for paper road maps has dropped by more than a half in the last decade, but appears to have stabilized. Canada’s largest map publisher, with the distinctive yellow branding, is Mapart, based in Oshawa; in Quebec, it distributes maps under the JDMGEO brand.
The company has adapted to the GPS invasion by producing “GPS compatible maps” - whatever that means, plus a range of specialty maps like the one they created last year where fans of Ontario provincial parks can scratch off the ones they’ve visited to reveal a colourful map underneath.
The decline of roadmaps due to the domination of GPS is having another impact in line with the countless other nefarious effects of smartphones and digital technology. A Mcgill research study made international news a few
Iyears back. It observed that “young adults tended to use a spatial approach when navigating a virtual maze, while older adults used a response strategy.”
It concluded that the constant use of GPS may lead to “atrophy of the hippocampus, a risk factor for cognitive problems in normal aging and in Alzheimer’s disease.”
It may also lead to more map-shunning young people, hooked on GPS, finding themselves directionless on a road to nowhere.”
’m writing today to talk about the lack of mask wearing in public places in Lennoxville, in particular our local grocery store. Apart from a few older patrons and even fewer of the younger set, most clients – and all staff – are not wearing masks. I did speak to the owner of the grocery store and he assured me he is considering making masks mandatory. I am urging him to stop “considering” it and just do it. Once it’s mandatory, it will become the norm and people will get used to it – and it might even become trendy! It’s such a simple thing to do and inexpensive masks are available everywhere these days. Other stores in Lennoxville are limiting customers to their premises and requiring mask wearing. Personally, I will no longer be comfortable shopping at this grocery store until changes are made. The owner of this store has done so much for our community over the years. It’s now time for him to “do the right thing”. I urge others who feel this way to speak to the owner or leave a comment on their Facebook page.