Thanks to satnav, we don’t know where we’re going

Is there any more infuriating utterance in the English language? There you are, halfway up some Spanish mountain, slowly being baked alive in your car. Your water bottles are empty and your tempers are high; the slightest mistake could turn your holiday into a shouting match. Then you miss a turn, and the satnav rolls its prim little apple of discord between you: “Recalculating …”

Cheap GPS receivers have transformed our lives, but they can so easily lead us astray. Just ask the troupe of Zulu performers whose bus turned up at St Anne’s School in Welton, East Yorkshire, instead of a similarly named school in London.

Plato warned us about this. He proposed that learning to write would “implant forgetfulness in [our] souls”; we would “cease to exercise memory because [we] rely on what is written.” He was right: I had to Google that quote. How many of us – Sherlock excepted – still use memory palaces, common in the ancient world?

So too now our automated maps begin to displace the world. Foyles book shop lets you log in with your phone and gives you a route through its shelves to the book you want. Uber drivers whisk you home while cheerfully admitting they have no idea where they are. How often have you rushed to meet a friend, letting a screen guide you round unfamiliar corners, only to realise later that you have no recollection of the area? As the title of a recent report put it: “The map is now the territory.”

As well as great convenience, this creates business. Companies are rushing to build rapidly updated maps that gather data from smartphones and cameras for use by driverless cars, delivery companies, and high street shops. Our ambling is tracked and analysed by minds beyond our ken.

But that has dangers too, and not just to our privacy. When you explore a new city using these tools it can be as if you are playing Pac-man on a treadmill. You walk forward until your little player-dot reaches the junction, turn right until you reach the bus stop, and then let an app compute you a path home, following digital ley lines. When you finally look up at the city you do so not as an active citizen, who has had to learn it and engage with it, but as a bystander upon a mere spectacle. These days we often simply don’t know where we are.

Digital navigation is not without its own serendipities. On a recent family holiday to France we diverted round an accident – only to be trapped in a secondary jam in a tiny hamlet whose mystified residents gazed from their gardens at the sudden influx of vehicles, all directed there by Google.

There’s nothing wrong with the convenience auto-mapping creates and the navigational superpowers it gives us. But to find our way only with maps drawn by others leaves us powerless and ignorant. It is wise, wherever we have the space and time, to explore a little, in order to draw up our own.