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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | RE: GISList: NPR, CNN, Iraq & the elusive "GIS" |
| Date: |
04/07/2003 02:15:00 AM |
| From: |
Michael Gould |
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Comments below.
At 09:26 04/04/2003 -0500, Anthony Quartararo wrote:
>Both good points and well taken. However, when I hear and see what cluele=
ss
>celebrity news anchors say and do while using these very powerful tools of
>persuasion (I'm not kidding, it's just like Monday Night Football - with t=
he
>same intellectual capital), the ability to present an incredible array of
>spatial information to global audiences, all the time, over and over, the
>impact of a little white "lie" makes "How to Lie with Maps" seem almost
>quaint and homey. We don't need to worry about official misinformation
>sanctioned as part of a military strategy, the media has that handled all
>too well. I'm not expecting the "beautiful people" at CNN to launch into a
>GIS 101 course each time they ramp up the Teledestructor, but it does
>bother me that these fools are many people's first real exposure to the
>power and application of the fruit of our collective efforts.
>
>I sometimes explain to people I meet that what I do (and what industry I
>work in) is to make the guts of "Mapquest.com" for lots of different
>industries, and they seem to get it right away. This is a 10 second
>explanation that works just fine in social settings, because when I launch
>into the GIS 101 course, lots of glassy eyes abound.
I would think a quick reference like "location technology, you know, the=20
stuff that allows your cell phone mobile services to work depending on your=
=20
location" would do the trick. Everyone has a cell phone, and cool people=20
think about them a lot (!), so for a party topic I would not even mention=
=20
maps and the more academic parts of what we really do. :-)
>While I'm not
>pretending to be an ambassador for the industry, every chance I get to turn
>someone on to "how do they do that....", I take advantage. The point is, =
in
>the rush and effort to become ingrained into everyday business/consumer
>mainstream technology, are we (and we should be) prepared to hand over
>control of the mainstream "interface" to non-industry professionals ?
cheers
Mike Gould
>ajq
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Richard Hoskins [mailto:healthmaps@attbi.com]
> > Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 8:43 AM
> > To: gislist@geocomm.com
> > Subject: RE: GISList: NPR, CNN, Iraq & the elusive "GIS"
> >
> >
> > Totally right-on comment. When I show up at community
> > meetings with cool maps and statistical models of why the
> > such and such death rate near a toxic waste site is higher
> > than elsewhere, I sort of have my feelings hurt because the
> > community passes right over the technology, GIS, computation,
> > and statistical effort that it took to produce the results.
> >
> >
> > Then I remind myself that is exactly why we are using the
> > technology in the first place, that is, so citizens and
> > policy makers can focus on the problem and not on some arcane
> > process outside their scope and interest. When technology
> > becomes transparent - we have done our job.
> >
> > Richard E. Hoskins
> > WA State Dept of Health
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Michael Gould [mailto:gould@lsi.uji.es]
> > Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 5:27 AM
> > To: gislist@geocomm.com
> > Subject: Re: GISList: NPR, CNN, Iraq & the elusive "GIS"
> >
> >
> > Anthony seems surprised that people on the street i.e. the
> > press, do not
> >
> > talk about GIS.
> >
> > This seems strange to some of us deeply embedded in the GIS
> > field, but in
> > the end "normal" people care about results, not the
> > technologies behind the
> > scenes. I can imagine that experts in tire rubber compounds
> > are amazed that
> > Formula-1 commentators only talk about speed, positions, how
> > much drivers
> > get paid, etc. and do not focus enough on how well a certain
> > tire seems to
> > be adhering :-)
> >
> > Earthviewer lets people see Bagdad. They don't care how many
> > GISs it took
> > to produce each view or which SUN server is driving the web site.
> >
> > Just an observation.
> > cheers
> > Mike Gould
> > sig below
> >
> > At 16:22 03/04/2003 -0500, Anthony Quartararo wrote:
> > >Just listened to an NPR report on the media's use of various
> > >graphic-intensive tools to illustrate the ongoing war in
> > Iraq. It was
> > >a nice piece, Keyhole's CEO had a few blurbs, and DigitalGlobe got a
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