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NAVI / GATED / GAZE: Google Earth’s Narrative of the Earth and the Privatization of Gaze

  • Marie Heinrichs (author)
Chapter of: Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene(pp. 125–151)

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Metadata
TitleNAVI / GATED / GAZE
SubtitleGoogle Earth’s Narrative of the Earth and the Privatization of Gaze
ContributorMarie Heinrichs (author)
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
CopyrightMarie Heinrichs
Publishermeson press
Published on2021-03-15
Long abstractWith Google Earth, the pictures “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble”—symbols of the environmental movement and a global community—have come to inhabit our screens as virtual and interactive globes. Free navigational platforms have been considered as democratizing mapping practices. However, little attention has been paid to examining whose perspective it is that these representations are based on, and what this perspective is capable of conveying. In this article, I identify the user interface of Google Earth as a mode of production related to a structure of knowledge and power; inscribed into several forms of maps, this structure implies powerful narratives, which commercial companies can easily capitalize on. Central for Google has been the narrative of an interconnected global village as an ideology of the future, perfectly visualized in Google Earth: an advertising, user-generated, and editorially created three-dimensional interface that is consumed as representational of a given reality imparts total coverage of the world as progressive, and as supporting environmental claims. Instead, I suggest, the narrative of interconnected globality strengthens the power of Google as a company. Its algorithms guide “our” perception on the world.
Page rangepp. 125–151
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Marie Heinrichs

(author)

Marie Heinrichs studies European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam. Her main areas of research interest include materialism(s), embodiment, physicality, feminist standpoint theory, critical theory of technology, and protest movements.