All Mapped Out: How Maps Shape Us

Maps go far beyond just showing us where things are located. All Mapped Out is an exploration of how maps impact our lives on social and cultural levels. This book takes readers on a journey through the fascinating history of maps, from ancient cave paintings and stone carvings to the digital interfaces we rely on today. But it’s not just about the maps themselves; it’s about the people behind them. Discover how maps have affected societies, influenced politics and economies, impacted the environment, and even shaped our sense of personal identity. Mike Duggan uncovers the incredible power of maps to shape the world and the knowledge we consume. This is a unique and eye-opening perspective on the significance of maps in our daily lives.

About the Author :
Mike Duggan is a Lecturer at King's College London studying digital culture's impact on society. He is the co-author of books on radical cartography and sharing mobility.

Review :
Cultural geographer Duggan works in partnership with the UK national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, to study everyday digital-mapping practices. Important as it is, digital mapping is not superseding analogue maps, he observes in his global history of cartography, which begins with Palaeolithic carvings. Sales of Ordnance Survey paper maps are rising, perhaps because of their convenience. “Although digital maps are improving constantly in accuracy and design, they do not always live up to those promises.” Anyone reading Mike Duggan’s exhaustive deconstruction of the concept of mapping will never look at a map in the same way again . . . By examining the complex ways in which maps shape our lives, from the politics they create to the emotional responses they evoke, Duggan’s book proceeds to demonstrate that maps deal not only with the cartographic features of our world but “play an important role in who we are, where we’ve come from and where we’re going." Broad in compass and ambitious in scope, this new look at the map in the digital age is fascinating. Mike Duggan’s journey through maps takes us to places, landscapes and times past, present and future, traversing a busy and sometimes complicated picture and engaging with theoretical views on cartography as well as the pragmatics of how maps shape our lives. All Mapped Out helps us to see maps differently, as well as understand how maps continue to influence us. Compelling and engaging, this book will appeal to cartophiles everywhere. All Mapped Out is an entertaining adventure for everyone who loves maps, both real and imaginary, analogue and digital. Mike Duggan – in this reliable guide to an unreliable technology – invites us to re-examine our assumptions about the spatial representations of not only unfamiliar places, but the sites we inhabit with meaning and call home. From travelling London in the backseat of a black taxi to following grizzly bears and migrants, rally drivers and Tube riders, geocachers and map collectors, All Mapped Out offers a provocative and surprising study of maps and mapping. In this journey, we encounter maps scratched onto rocks and materializing on plasma screens, maps made of words and sounds, and even maps meant to be seen by the eyes of self-driving cars rather than of humans. Mike Duggan asks questions of our present reliance on digital mapping: how the technologies subtly pervade our lives, condition our consumption habits and even shape our experience of the world. All Mapped Out is a freewheeling journey through a conceptual terrain with few distinct borders. While treading deep into critical questions about the power and practices of contemporary maps, Duggan also includes plenty of compelling excursions through cartographic history.