Gimleteye: Apple maps, do we ever really know where we are

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple -- the world's largest company by market valuation -- made an extraordinary admission of the company's failure to deliver a reliable maps application with the release of its new iPhone. Cook directed customers to competitors' products as an alternative until Apple engineers can make good on its promise.

The New York Times minced no words, "It may be the most embarrassing, least usable piece of software Apple has ever unleashed." But it's more. A map is more than a map.

One explanation offered is that Apple -- the company sold 5 million units of the new phone in the first week -- underestimated the furor because the company did not realize the importance of the map feature among its software hits. Fifteen years ago, Google wasn't even a word. So what's the big deal?



Interesting question. Maps are an abiding interest of humanity. My father, an immigrant, collected antique maps from the part of his new country he called home. They were beautiful but also helped, in an existential way, to explain where he was. That was a beautiful thing for someone whose world had been ripped out from under him.

For earlier generations, as our knowledge of the world grew expansive, maps acquired economic purposes. As print and information distribution evolved, maps followed and began to describe every place we knew or wanted to know.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Maps provided political context to economic realities. Maps provide a measure of certainty. There is nothing relative about them. They describe boundaries -- correct, contested, as the case may be -- that are fixed by law. We know where we are, by maps.

So why, if we are overwhelmed with information, should we care if a mapping application emerges imperfectly from the largest computer company in the world? Why, among all the possible faults one could find with the core software applications on the iPhone, do maps bring Tim Cook to the corporate porch, to address the multitudes?

Maps don't just tell us where we are, by inference they tell us where we really are. And where we really are, in the context of the vast flood of information in our complicated post-industrial Western world, is not clear at all.

Not all the Bible study classes, not all the Shariah law, not all the proscriptions of the Torah, can tell us where we really are, though all these try. On a deep level, Apple hit the trip wire of cultural sensitivities that go straight to the heart of mapping our national insecurity. America used to be the shining city on the hill: where are we now?

Our uncertainty has grown in proportion to our mastery of the world and its resources. There is an obvious urgency to our wanting to know. Our tasks are endless, what once seemed easier and more simple is now complex and freighted with contradictions. All our technologies, improving our quality of life and standards of living, are meant to keep us organized enough to improve the chances we know where we really are.

Strange that a simple mapping feature by the world's largest corporation would point to our existential vulnerabilities. This crisis of knowing where we really are doesn't even have a name, yet. Technologies mask our personal vulnerabilities and when the way is not clear, for even a nanosecond, the skies light up with complaints. The answers to our mapping problems can't be outsourced and, ultimately, can't be answered even by the most elegant technologies. For the living, there is a time-limited warranty.