Being Where? Putting Memory, Technology, and Wayfinding Together Again

Summary

Negative assessments of GPS as causing 'de-skilling' and disrupting spatial memory are widespread, but a broader perspective shows human spatial memory has always been incomplete and dependent on culture, social practices, and environment. GPS effects are better understood as reconfigurations of wayfinding ecologies—distributed cognitive systems used for navigation. Negative effects are not inevitable but emerge from longer historical processes of cognitive-technological coevolution. Individual and group variability in spatial cognition and technology use matters: some users become passive, while others develop expert strategies of skillful incorporation. The key is not whether GPS is used, but how, and opportunities exist for deliberate ecological design to shape future wayfinding ecologies.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Although wayfinding is a central domain for 4E research, much work on spatial cognition and navigation still operates within an internalist framework. This is particularly damaging in evaluating the cognitive impact of technologies like Global Positioning Systems (GPS), where negative assessments about ‘de-skilling’ and the digital disruption of biocognitive spatial memory capacities are widespread in science and popular culture alike. We offer a new, broader perspective for understanding the alleged technological fragmentation of spatial knowledge. Critically surveying evidence for GPS effects on spatial cognition, we reconstrue such effects as configurations of wayfinding ecologies – the flexible and dynamic distributed cognitive systems we use to navigate. Long before GPS, human spatial memory was far from complete or perfectly effective – more of a collage or a patchwork than a detailed map – and is heavily dependent on enculturation, shared social practices, and the specific features of experienced environments. Where there are negative effects of persistent GPS use on spatial cognition, these are not inevitable results of new digital systems acting out of the blue, but emerge from longer historical processes in which other forms of cognitive-technological coevolution configure the fragile balances of our wayfinding ecologies. What matters both psychologically and politically, we argue, is not simply that GPS technologies are used, but how they are used. There is still dramatic individual and group variability in spatial cognition and in the ways that navigation technologies are deployed in practice. Some users may become relatively passive in handing over all engagement with their environments to increasingly personalized algorithms. Others develop unique or expert strategies of skilful incorporation, adding new hybrid capacities to already specialized socio-cognitive practices. An analysis that resists nostalgia and techno-gloom can identify opportunities for deliberate ecological design to help shape conditions under which technologies operate, rather than accepting whatever configurations emerge from market forces or design defaults. There is no simple choice between resisting or embracing technological change, but a range of ways we can more or less thoughtfully and sensitively craft the wayfinding ecologies of our own shared future.