Walking with GPS: An object lesson

Abstract

Many environmental historians have embraced Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as a tool and an analytical framework for their research (e.g. Bonnel and Fortin 2014), but little has been written about its companion technology, the handheld GPS (Global Positioning Systems) device. GPS sensors have become ubiquitous over the last decade, and are now routinely embedded in computers, telephones, tablets, watches, and so on. Yet, the GPS is also functionally blackboxed in discussions about the meaning and experience of place, making it into either an invisible technology or one that has predetermined detrimental effects. This chapter argues that in the dialog between what we see on the screen in our hand and the world out there, the GPS represents a way of seeing and interpreting nature that we need to incorporate in our scholarship. As environmental historians, we should investigate the digital mediation of landscape just as closely as we investigate the landscapes that are being mediated. To do that we need to pay close attention to the workings of technology, challenging what we see on the surface and opening up the black box of technology for cultural analysis (Winner 1993; Latour 2013). In both teaching and research, critical investigation of the GPS allows us to reflect on the influence of technology on the perception of the landscapes surrounding us. It lets us explore the theoretical and methodological implications of writing and teaching environmental history in a world where people increasingly experience nature through or with the assistance of a diverse range of technologies. This chapter proposes that object lessons can be productively applied touncover the methodological implications of thinking about the GPS as a technology for engaging with place and space. I am here not thinking about the most common contemporary usage of the phrase “object lesson,” typically used to “demonstrate some inviolable but self-evident principle-and often offered as a warning to those who might stray from it” (Young 2013, p. 6). Instead, I propose the older history of object lessons, developed as a pedagogical method of teaching attention to and awareness of the world through objects. In doing so, this chapter serves a dual methodological purpose. First, it asks how we as environmental historians can interrogate material objects, both made and found, in our research and teaching. Second, it examines in detail one particular object-the handheld GPS unit-and places it in its larger societal and infrastructuralcontext. The chapter ends with a reflection on whether space and place has come to mean something else in the digital age than before. How does the sensory and epistemological experience of a landscape change with the tools and technologies we have at hand to experience it through? The attention-building structure of the object lesson will serve to shift our attention from the object itself towards the relationships that the GPS enables, between the mind, the body, and nature. I will begin by introducing object lessons and their history more thoroughly,before I turn our attention to the GPS unit, loosely following the structure set up by Elizabeth Mayo in her 1831 book Lessons on Objects. I will argue that a GPS device can hold an object lesson for environmental historians and as such has a place in our teaching and research. It is an extraordinarily complex object that links age-old navigational practices, everyday landscape experience, and Cold War space technology. The GPS unit begs us to engage with a set of questions about how we know and make sense of the world around us, rather than simply being passive users of a technology that tells us where we are. The GPS becomes an object lesson which uncovers the entanglement of the digital and the material, of media and environment. It offers us a way to think about the presence of data in and about nature.