Google Street View and the Image as Experience

Abstract

Google Street View (GSV) presents the world as fact, mapped and documented, and reconstituted online: an approximation of the street condition. Google’s fleet takes the built environment as its territory, renders it photographically, and maps it spatially. GSV’s comprehensive coverage makes it useful for daily navigational needs, and its diverse mapped terrain encourages user innovation, experimentation, and exploration. As a spatial representation, it brings together two distinct ways of knowing the world through empirical documentation: mapping and photography. Whereas maps offer visual diagrams of spatial information, photographs offer documents with spatiotemporal specificity. Together, the spatialized image becomes the mode of navigation and exploration. This article draws on the embodied subject, wayfinding, and perception in relation to spatial knowledge formation to consider GSV’s ability to alter existing daily practices. Rather than the sensorial rich primary experience of moving through the world, the visually rich secondary experiences via GSV come to inform our navigation and exploration through image recognition. This article argues that the platform’s spatialized image and efficient technological layer produces a shift from the embodied experience of place to the image as experience.

谷歌街景（GSV）将世界呈现为真实之物、加以製图并记录，并且在网上重新建构之：街道情境的模拟。谷歌的车队将建成环境当成其领域，并以照片呈现，且在空间上进行製图。GSV全面性的涵盖，使其有助于每日生活导航所需，而其多样的製图领域，鼓励使用者进行创新、实验和探索。谷歌街景作为空间再现，结合了两个透过经验记录来认知世界的截然不同之方式：製图与摄影。製图提供了空间信息的视觉图解，而摄影则提供了时空特殊性的记录。两者的结合，让空间化的影像成为导航和探索的方法。本文运用身体化的主体、寻路、以及有关空间知识形成的感知，考量GSV改变既有的每日生活实践的能力。透过GSV提供的丰富视觉二手经验，是透过影像的指认告知我们的导航和探索，而非透过在世界中移动的丰富亲身感官经验。本文主张，该平台的空间化影像，以及有效的技术层，生产了从身体化的地方经验到影像作为地方经验的改变。

La Vista de Callejera de Google (Google Street View, GSV) muestra el mundo como un hecho, mapeado y documentado, y reconstituido en red: un acercamiento a la condición callejera. El equipo de Google convierte el entorno construido en su territorio, lo reproduce fotográficamente y mapea su espacialidad. La amplia cobertura de la GSV la hace útil para las necesidades de navegación cotidiana y su diverso terreno cartografiado fomenta la innovación en el usuario, la experimentación y la exploración. En su condición de representación espacial, junta dos maneras distintas de conocer el mundo por medio de la documentación empírica: el mapeo y la fotografía. Mientras los mapas ofrecen diagramas visuales de información espacial, las fotografías nos brindan documentos de especificidad espaciotemporal. Al integrarse los dos, la imagen espacializada se convierte en el modo de navegación y exploración. Este artículo se apoya en el sujeto personificado, el liderazgo y la percepción relativa a la formación del conocimiento espacial para considerar la capacidad de la GSV de alterar las prácticas cotidianas actuales. Más que la rica experiencia sensorial de moverse en el mundo, las experiencias secundarias visualmente enriquecidas por la GSV vienen a informar nuestra navegación y exploración por medio del reconocimiento de imagen. Este artículo sostiene que la capa tecnológica de la imagen espacializada y eficaz de la plataforma genera un cambio desde la experiencia personificada del lugar hacia la imagen como experiencia.

• navigation
• perception
• phenomenology
• spatial representations
• technology

• 导航
• 感知
• 现象学
• 空间再现
• ，技术

• navegación
• percepción
• fenomenología
• representaciones espaciales
• tecnología

Notes

1. A growing body of literature assesses GSV as a methodological tool for analyzing the built environment features, including gentrification, pedestrian safety, aging in place, health, and physical environment features, but does not adopt a critical perspective. A number of legal notes critically examine privacy precedents in light of GSV. Although important, both these approaches are outside the scope of this article.

2. This article draws on the phenomenological method to give description to cognitive processes of wayfinding and perception (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008), rather than challenge existing theories.

3. For technical description, see Anguelov et al. (2010). For Google’s Ground Truth project, see Madrigal (2012) and Miller (2014). Ground Truth harnesses the path of travel of GSV to build accurate base maps; algorithms assess images for informational content to aid driving directions. The deep mapping that results from the Ground Truth project establishes the importance of the photographic image and path of travel (Miller 2014), and gives Google an extraordinarily valuable data set of mapped spaces, including the driverless car project. This becomes more pronounced when considering the transition of the government role of maintaining accurate maps to the private market (Lee 2010). The enormous political implication of this level of control is outside the scope of this article, but is part of ongoing research (Gilge 2014).

4. Gibson’s (1979) theory of affordances states that, as agents in the world, we identify objects to afford or enable certain types of actions and will appropriate them accordingly. For example, a stable surface between knee and hip height affords a place to sit.

5. For additional information on partner programs, see http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/imagery/index.html/(last accessed 25 April 2016); for the photography program, see https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/maps/streetview/trusted-signup/(last accessed 25 April 2016).

6. In contrast, inadvertently dropping Pegman into an interior scene elicits surprise and severs the fluid experience. “Anticipation” structures our affective response.

7. See https://www.google.com/maps/about/behind-the-scenes/streetview/treks/(last accessed 24 July 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cheryl Gilge

CHERYL GILGE is an Affiliate Lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning and Design in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include mediated urban experiences, the role of technology, and the tensions that emerge between social structures and individual practices that give shape to the social field.