Hybrid spaces of satellite navigation

Abstract

The mediatisation of everyday life leads to the transformation of a wide array of everyday practices including driving and walking. The paper focuses on the effects of drivers’ and pedestrians’ growing reliance on GPS enabled navigation systems as a major component of a more general process of the mediatisation of mobilities. From everyday conversations to newspaper articles to scientific papers, the dissemination of GPS navigation gave rise to concerns that excessive use of satellite navigation would lead to negative consequences. Several studies, characterized by experimental methodology and cognitivist assumptions, have analyzed the effects of satellite navigation on users. These studies have a common theoretical and conceptual background and apply similar research methods, and they came to results pointing in the same direction. According to them, using digital navigation tools cause the deterioration of the sense of space, spatial orientation, and spatial memory.

Beyond cognitivism there is a further theory that is inRuential in the interpretation of the results. According to this dominant theoretical interpretation, over-reliance on GPS navigation leads to disengagement from space and physical surroundings and therefore loss of meaning. This theory of disengagement from space is, however, far from the cognitivist approach as it has its roots in a particular philosophy of technology. The theory of disengagement from spaces was formulated not in the context of modern urbanized societies but with regards to Inuit travellers in the Arctic whose younger generations began to increasingly rely on satellite navigation while gradually abandoning their traditional navigation methods. This theory is based on a thorough study of Inuit travellers, however, several of its theoretical assumptions prove to be problematic. Therefore, there is a need of an alternative theoretical interpretation of driving and walking with GPS navigation.

Based on the phenomenology of perception, the paper proposes the engagement with hybrid spaces as the alternative theoretical interpretation. Persons using satellite navigation construct a hybrid space for themselves involving material elements of their physical surroundings and ‘virtual’ elements provided by the screen of their device. Results of experimental studies should not be neglected, it is certainly true that, while engaging with hybrid spaces, awareness of the physical surroundings, to a certain degree, weakens. But at the same time actors learn to actively engage with the hybrid space of GPS navigation. They experience new sensations and develop novel senses. Processes of disengagement from physical spaces are counterbalanced by active engagements with the hybrid space of GPS navigation. In late modern societies, by using a variety of media and devices, there are multiple ways of creating hybrid spaces of which the situation of satellite navigation is only one example. The hybridization of wayQnding is part of the overarching process of mediatization.