Wow, this is wonderful: Nicholas Carr posted a great piece from a recent lecture in which he addressed Marshall McLuhan’s idea of automation as media. In this excerpt, he tells a history of how cartography, likely the first medium, went from passive to active player as we transitioned from paper to software:

I’m going to tell the story through the example of the map, which happens to be my all-time favorite medium. The map was, so far as I can judge, the first medium invented by the human race, and in the map we find a microcosm of media in general. The map originated as a simple tool. A person with knowledge of a particular place drew a map, probably in the dirt with a stick, as a way to communicate his knowledge to another person who wanted to get somewhere in that place. The medium of the map was just a means to transfer useful knowledge efficiently between a knower and a doer at a particular moment in time.

Then, at some point, the map and the mapmaker parted company. Maps started to be inscribed on pieces of hide or stone tablets or other objects more durable and transportable than a patch of dirt, and when that happened the knower’s presence was no longer necessary. The map subsumed the knower. The medium became the knowledge. And when a means of mechanical reproduction came along — the printing press, say — the map became a mass medium, shared by a large audience of doers who wanted to get from one place to another.

For most of recent history, this has been the form of the map we’ve all been familiar with. You arrive in some new place, you go into a gas station and you buy a map, and then you examine the map to figure out where you are and to plot a route to get to wherever you want to be. You don’t give much thought to the knower, or knowers, whose knowledge went into the map. As far as you’re concerned, the medium is the knowledge.

Something very interesting has happened to the map recently, during the course of our own lives. When the medium of the map was transferred from paper to software, the map gained the ability to speak to us, to give us commands. With Google Maps or an in-dash GPS system, we no longer have to look at a map and plot out a route for ourselves; the map assumes that work. We become the actuators of the map’s instructions: the assistants who, on the software’s command, turn the wheel. You might even say that our role becomes that of a robotic apparatus controlled by the medium.

So, having earlier subsumed the knower, the map now begins to subsume the doer. The medium becomes the actor.

In the next and ultimate stage of this story, the map becomes the vehicle. The map does the driving.•