Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps

Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps explores the mundane act of navigating cities in the age of digital mapping infrastructures.
Noone follows the frictions routing through Google Maps' categorising and classifying of spatial information. Complicating the assumption that digital maps distort a sense of direction, Noone argues that Google Maps' location awareness does more than just organise and orient a representation of space-it also organises and orients imaginaries of publicness, selfsufficiency, legibility, and error. At the same time, Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps helps to animate the ordinary ways people are challenging and refusing Google Maps' vision of the world. Drawing on an arts-based field study spanning the streets of London, New York, London, Toronto, and Amsterdam, Noone's encounters of "asking for directions" open up lines of inquiry and spatial scores that cut through Google's universal mapping project.
Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps will be essential reading for information studies and media studies scholars and students with an interest in embodied information practices, critical information studies, and critical data studies. The book will also appeal to an urban studies audience engaged in work on the digital city and the datafication of urban environments.

List of contents

1. The Lost Art of Location Awareness; 2. Geographies of Public Good; 3. Geographies of Self-Sufficiency; 4. Orientations of Legibility; 5. Orientations of Error; 6. Epilogue: Reorienting Location Awareness

About the author

Rebecca Noone is an artist and a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Information Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.

Product details

• Authors: Rebecca Noone
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 26.12.2025
• EAN: 9781032170503
• ISBN: 978-1-032-17050-3
• No. of pages: 152
• Illustrations: schwarz-weiss Illustrationen, Raster,schwarz-weiss
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Geosciences > Geography; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Book trade, library system; Cartography, map-making & projections, Interdisciplinary studies, Information technology: general issues, Human Geography, Urban communities, Cartography, map-making and projections, Library & Information Sciences, Geographical information systems (GIS) & remote sensing, Library and information sciences / Museology, Geographical information systems, geodata and remote sensing, Urban communities / city life, Digital and Information technology: general topics