Human geography

GPS World, Nov, 2004 by Glen Gibbons

I recently read the comments of a television celebrity who confided that her greatest regret in life was not keeping a diary.

I share her remorse.

My memory, which once seemed so sharp, retentive, and unsullied at 18, has become quite the little dustbin of history. Remembrances that formerly organized themselves neatly along chronological rows and categorical columns have taken on the dynamics of lint subjected to static electricity. My buffer overfloweth. For every new datum locked into the attic of my memory's hoard, some unpredictable quantum of personal history gets shoved overboard.

Can GPS save me from this dilemma? Why not?

If we could record our journeys through the physical world, they would comprise an automatic history, a lazy man's diary. The log of our comings and goings would provide stimulus cues from which to recall motives, creating a personalized map of human need and desire, of discovery and missed connections. Lives that so often seem to be on autopilot would have a "black box" recorder for recovering the moments before we crashed and burned, to let us know just where we went off course, where we made the fatal turn. Or, conversely, how those recurring serendipities of human lives converge and set off in new directions.

I remember one year my father set up the video camera to record our family's Thanksgiving, and left it on during the dinner. (Yes, yes, I know--like the woman in the produce section murmuring sweet nothings into her cell phone, this story raises questions about appropriate use of technology.)

When we looked at the videotape later, Dad hit the fast-forward button to skip through the meal. What jumped out at us from the film was my mother's repeated flights from the table to the kitchen to bring in more food. While the rest of us oblivious gourmands bantered jovially, passing serving plates or pouring wine with rapid-fire intensity, Mom hardly touched down in her chair before flying off to gather more largesse for her brood. In the afterimage of her flight paths you could almost see flames flickering behind her. Few things have illustrated for me the traditional service role of earlier generations of women as did these high-speed peregrinations inadvertently captured on our holiday footage.

Who we are, then, is in many ways the sum of our travels. Important clues to why we are here can be seen in where we have gone and where are going.

Is this all too farfetched and abstract to possibly apply to our actual lives? In an era when passports declare our identities based on the biometrics of retinal scans, why should a record of our movements be any less valid?

Insurance companies are investigating ways to set premiums based on the personal travel histories of policyholders. Thousands of probationers have come under real-time surveillance, courtesy of GPS. Of course, many--perhaps most--people would not want this capability applied to them outside their means of control. An extreme example: the growing number of murder suspects trapped by a GPS record of their movements, the juxtaposition with crime scenes, the irrefutable history of where they've been and when.

It's all so very possible today largely due to GPS, which can affordably measure everything that moves. This week I came across a news item announcing a new GPS receiver, one that combines the RFIC and DSP on a single chip. The unit price is less than $8 in quantities of 100,000. Comes in a little QFN 68-pin package manufactured by means of a 0.18-micron CMOS process.

A little centimeter-square positioning device, available for pocket change, thanks to the marvel of a billion-dollar satellite constellation 12,000 miles away. Add a little data storage and we can traverse the terrain of human geography, logging our footprints in the sands of time and recounting the meaning of our passages.

And never have to set pen to paper again.

Glen Gibbons / Editor

ggibbons@advanstar.com