Interesting implications, perhaps the global positioning system is not as infallible as we thought
Hmm. Maybe if I live long enough, my only slightly rusty skills in map reading and navigation by dead reckoning will once again be useful.
Sounds like a job for space force!
I wonder how many youth can’t do paper maps.
It’s not just youth, it’s people across the entire population that have issues reading maps.
I work in 911 dispatch, obviously a big part of the job is all about location. We spend a lot of our shift looking at maps on our screen trying to figure out where people are so we can send them help.
In training for a couple days, they busted out paper maps of our county and had us locate different intersections, landmarks, etc. our class skewed a bit younger, mostly millennials at the time (this was about 6 years ago) but also some Gen x and boomers. I’d say only about 3 out of the 12 of us were really proficient at all at reading a map.theru wasn’t any particular age bias, really what it seemed to come down to is “who was in boy scouts”
And it’s not a new thing, a lot of people have had a hard time with maps probably since maps were invented. It takes certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills that some people just struggle with. My boomer mom could never read a map, a lot of my grade school years were the days before GPS and half of my class always struggled with it when it came up in history/geography/social studies, it’s been used as a joke in movies for decades. It’s probably gotten somewhat worse since people don’t use paper maps as much anymore, but there’s also a “use it or lose it” aspect, I noticed that my own map and compass skills have degraded a little recently while hiking a new trail with a paper map, there’s probably a few older people who used to be pretty proficient at reading a map but would have a hard time with it since they haven’t had to in over a decade.
I’m curious, how much does 911 dispatch rely on Google maps? (Street view at all?)
I’m in my 50s and I can’t do paper maps. I can navigate just fine without Google maps but I navigate by landmarks while paper maps seem to rely on knowing road names, which I don’t.
This is why numbered roads are better. 5th St? Guess what’s coming next, 6th St!
There’s no need to go back to paper maps if it’s just GPS and mobile Internet that are unavailable. Osmand works just fine without them. It’s the map application I always wanted, none of that always-online nonsense.
To be more specific, I wonder how many people rely on GPS turn-by-turn navigation, vs being able to read and navigate by a map be it a paper map or electronic map (without ‘my location’ or other GPS functionality.)
GPS is irreplaceable in stuff like modern day aviation and shipping though.
It’s not that people just don’t have the ability to use paper maps, that can be solved relatively quickly, it’s that nowadays we’re used to departing for somewhere without looking up the route, it’s faster than it used to be; if we have to go back, that’s something we’ll lose.
Very few of us most definitely (me too, 23), but if necessity brings us back to paper maps, then we are going to get used to it, just as you were.
I think I recall some years back that the American Automobile Association stopped offering paper maps at their offices.
You can still print out maps, but those have an index to find roads, are useful to do road navigation.
That being said, a computerized map without satellite positioning system is probably the most-realistic alternative, but since you mentioned paper…
