Week 3- Neogeography

View Marin County in a larger map

My family and I lived in Novato, California, which is in Marin County, from the summer of 2001 until this past summer of 2010 (though I started living in LA in 2009 for college). Throughout my eight years of living in Marin, I did a lot of exploration. On this map I marked some of the places that grew to be some of the most important places to me.
Thanks to neogeography, I am able to show these places on a map with relative ease. The convenience of having the map, and then being able to lay out points, lines, and polygons over it, marking wherever is desired, is great. Even beyond just marking places or routes on the map, embedding links, photos, and videos within these makes the experience of the place much more real, in a sense. Neogeography is a huge collaborative effort of people from all over the world and it has the potential to contribute greatly to our knowledge and understanding of the world.

While neogeography has the potential to contribute to our knowledge and understanding, it also has the power to detract from it. Unfortunately, not all people are honest, and even those who are are capable of making mistakes. The accuracy of mash-up maps is certainly something to be wary of. Someone can falsify information about a place, whether on purpose or by accident, and thus provide viewers with wrong information. A viewer may believe things to exist that in reality do not.

Neogeography has both positive and negative consequences. Positively, users are able describe place to others in an unforeseen way, being able to digitally update information and add multimedia. Marking online maps though neogeography as opposed marking on paper maps is by far a much cleaner, easier, and more attainable process. It is also a more environmentally friendly process as well, saving paper and thus, at least to some extent, limiting deforestation. Negatively, not only can people can falsify information about places as mentioned above, but people also have the potential to exploit others through neogeography, and a decline in privacy may result in consequence. Someone can make a mash-up map of celebrity homes, for example, and suddenly crowds could swarm the properties in efforts to get glimpses of their favorite movie stars.