Das Planetarische

Digging into Google Earth

Lisa Parks (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Abstract

The goal of this essay is to develop a series of critical questions for engaging with Google Earth layers and the kinds of historical and geographic knowledges they are used to produce. They essay moves from a discussion of the semiotics of the interface to an analysis of specific uses of Google Earth for “humanitarian” purposes concentrating upon the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. I also situate Google Earth interfaces within a broader history of global media exploring how they build upon and combine the conventions of world maps, travel photography, and global news networks. Like global newscasts, Google Earth interfaces appropriate satellite imagery to represent world historical events, yet differ in that the field of representation has been opened in an unprecedented way to geographically dispersed users with various vantage points, social backgrounds and political interests. GE users in different parts of the world can alter the interface by uploading data (whether text, photo, video or audio) that is specific to various locations. What distinguishes Google Earth from earlier media, then, is that geographic and historical information can be produced and uploaded from a variety of points on the planet and by a variety of users.

While celebrations of Google Earth’s potentials abound in the press, there has been minimal discussion regarding the disproportionate number of GE users in different parts of the world. In general, those with access to Google Earth remain a privileged few. Like news agencies, Google Earth databases tend to represent and speak for non-Western Others, extending Eurocentric knowledge systems rather than complicating them. In the Sudanese and Iraqi cases I examine, there is little historical contextualization at GE interfaces as well as a ready embrace of both satellite and ground perspectives as "truth-bearing evidence." Finally, there is little sense that the packaging and distribution of information in this way has had any impact upon international policy-making. The essay closes, then, with a discussion of a series of tensions embedded within Google Earth. More specifically, I consider the contradiction between Google’s corporatization of world space and individuals’ capacities to produce disparate knowledges about it, the disjuncture between orbital and grounded perspectives, and the power differentials between those who produce geo-encoded data and those rendered by it.

Bio

Lisa Parks ist Professorin am Department of Film and Media Studies an der University of California, Santa Barbara. Sie untersucht seit vielen Jahren die kulturellen und sozialen Implikationen von Satelliten, Fernsehen und Computertechnologien im transnationalen Kontext. Hierfür war/ist sie an verschiedenen internationalen Medienprojekten beteiligt, z. B. "Experiments in Satellite Media Arts" (2002), "Makrolab" (2002), "LOOM" (2003/04) und "Passports" (2004).

Ausgewählte Veröffentlichungen

Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening, Journal of Visual Culture, forthcoming Vol 6(2): 2007, 183-200.

Orbital Performers and Satellite Translators: Art in the Age of Ionospheric Exchange, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24 (2007), 207-216.

Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Console-Ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power), Duke University Press 2005.