S2, E2: How maps reveal by hiding

Welcome back to Negotiating Reality. I’m your host, Eric Hekler.

Last time we did a wandering exploration around reciprocity, anchored mostly in my own little story from about 2016 to the present day. Somewhere in there I promised that I’d come back with more about maps and why I think they matter. So here we are. This is the maps episode.

Of course, I’m using maps as a metaphor. I’m really talking about concepts, stories, and any symbols of reality that help us navigate. They are absolutely essential, as I brought up last time with the idea that we create the stories, and the stories create us. What I want to do today is explore that a bit more. How do stories create us? And I want to do it through the metaphor of maps, and in particular through that anchoring idea that a map is not the territory.

A map is not the territory

Where did that line come from? It’s from a thinker named Alfred Korzybski, around 1931, and I want to give you the longer version, because the longer version is doing more work than the short one:

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

There are a few things floating around in there that I want to unpack. One is the notion of usefulness. A map is for something. The other is that a map is structured like the territory, but it isn’t the territory. Those two things together are really important.

So before we get into the three kinds of maps, I want you to hold onto this basic point: maps are drawn by somebody, from where they stand, and they are oriented to where that somebody wants to go. And because of that, maps reveal things partly by hiding other things. They make choices about what to focus on in relation to where they want to be navigating toward.

That’s what makes the map such a good metaphor. It’s true of pretty much any symbol of reality: any representational tool, any concept, any object, our notions of objectivity and otherwise. All of them reveal by hiding. That’s what we’ll be playing around with today.

In particular, I want to walk through three kinds of maps, or stories, or concepts. The first is literally a schematic, like a schematic diagram. The second is stories, because that’s the big one: creation stories, stories about the future, predictions. And the third is the way I’m planning to use maps this season, which is more like a network. Think about satellites helping your phone tune in so that it can give you GPS coordinates, know where you are, and help you get where you want to go. That third type, GPS and network satellites, is the style I’m working with. The idea is to keep zooming out and asking: what if I look at the world from this satellite, or, in the language I used last time, from this situated perspective? And then from that one? Always coming back to that basic GPS question of, where am I, right now?

Harry Beck and the Tube

Before we get into the three maps, though, I want to give you a concrete historical example.

This is the story of Harry Beck, who designed the London Underground map in 1931. If you’ve never seen it, I’d invite you to look it up. It’s a real classic in urban planning. I know about it partly because my dad, Herb Hekler, was an urban planner. I remember visiting him in his office as a kid, and it was just covered in all these different maps. As the kid of an urban planner, I think I’ve always had a real appreciation for maps, and this is one of the stories my dad told me. I think it’s pretty cool.

So why is it a cool story? If you look at the London Underground map, it doesn’t really match the London that’s above ground. Why? Because Beck wasn’t trying to make a map to navigate the world above. He was trying to make a map to navigate the world underneath: the Underground, the Tube. So he cut out all the details that weren’t relevant for riding the Tube. He made the lines straight. He spaced the stations evenly so it was easy to read, one stop to the next. He blew up the center, where there was a lot going on, so it got bigger, and he squeezed the edges, where there wasn’t as much happening from a Tube rider’s perspective.

At first, the folks choosing which map to use said something like, this is radical and crazy, no way. But then they prototyped it, they tried it, and the public loved it. Why? It gave them just the information they needed to ride the Tube. It was brilliant. It was simple for its intended purpose.

Now, the key thing to remember. If you’ve ever been to London, you might have tried this. I actually did, a long while ago. I tried to navigate above ground using the Tube map, and long story short, it’s crappy. It’s horrible. Why? Because it wasn’t designed for that territory. It was designed to navigate below, not above. And how did it do that? By hiding the things that don’t matter underground, like the actual distances you travel. Whole neighborhoods just disappear from the map because there isn’t a Tube stop there.

That is the thing I want you to hold onto for any story, any concept, any time you create a representation of reality. There is the holistic phenomenon you’re trying to care about. And then there is the concept, the object, the story, which is only a partial representation of it. The holistic phenomenon is always so much bigger than the representation you’re working from. And that’s by design. That’s a good thing. That’s how concepts and stories work. Keep that in mind as we flow through all this.

Some questions to ask any map

So with that, here’s a little heuristic I’d invite you to use. Some questions you can ask about any map, story, concept, notion, object, or any other representation of reality:

* What was it made for?

* What does it hide in order to help you navigate?

* Where is it anchored in spacetime? Is it drawn from the past? Is it a hope for the future? Is it about right here?

* And critically, who made it, and what were their purposes?

I guess that’s more than three questions, but you get the idea. These are the kinds of questions I’d really like you to start asking.

This is also why we care about maps, concepts, and symbols of reality in the first place. The podcast is called Negotiating Reality, right? So eventually we have to get into how we actually do that. And part of the answer is recognizing that we are always communicating through words and concepts, and we need to learn how to interrogate when to trust them. That’s what we’re getting into now.

The first map: the schematic

Think of a repair manual, a blueprint, a wiring diagram, a diagram of a bicycle. A schematic is all about helping you see the parts and their interconnections inside its own little contained world. And when you look at a schematic diagram, you are very much looking down at a thing that you, as a human, can have complete control over. It’s the machine. It’s the view of the world as if it were a machine.

Of course, schematic diagrams are amazing. They are a critical part of what allows contemporary life to exist. Without them it would be very hard to build bridges, insulin pumps, cars, computers. Basically all of our machines require some kind of schematic to know how to build them, recreate them, and do so with precision.

In my world, in public health and psychology, I think the closest analogy is the logic model. A logic model lays out your inputs and your setting, then the processes you’re going to engage in, then your short-term outputs and outcomes, and then your long-term ones. You’re mapping out how you think things will work: I’m going to do these things, and if I do them, we’ll get this output. Handy. Really valuable. Honestly, it’s usually the first framework I teach students when they’re building a research plan, because it helps you get a sense of how you’re thinking these things will play out over time.

Here’s what I want you to tag about this style of map. It’s extremely common, and it leans on a metaphor that was especially popular before and during the Enlightenment: the world as a mecha…