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.