The Virtual Flaneur? Exploring Google Street View

Ben Connor The Virtual Flâneur?
THE VIRTUAL FLÂNEUR?

EXPLORING GOOGLE STREET VIEW
BENJAMIN CONNOR
MAY 2010
Presented as part of, and in accordance with, the requirements for the Final Degree of M.Sci
at the University of Bristol, School of Geographical Sciences, May 2010
Ben Connor The Virtual Flâneur? 2
i. Abstract
As the Internet becomes ever more deeply embedded in everyday life, cartography is
undergoing a radical transformation, with interactive, transient, online mapping
environments replacing static, durable map objects (Crampton, 2003a). Internet behemoth
Google has played an integral role in these developments, and with its latest technology,
Google Street View, has proclaimed to take “mapping to a level not possible before”
(Google, 2010a). Rather than adopting the abstracted, “God’s eye” view of the
“conventional” map, Street View represents the world from a decidedly more human
perspective, offering a navigable mapping environment consisting of linked 360°
photographic panoramas of the world’s streets, providing the viewer with an experience
akin to that of a virtual flâneur. Taking what I have termed a more-than-representational
approach to mapping, this study aims to explore some of the webs of meaning that have
been spun around Street View, understood as both a partial, situated representation of the
world, and a contested, affective element of material culture. I address Street View in three
parts: first by focusing closely on the visual form and interactive experience of using the
mapping environment itself, before second examining how it has been discursively
constructed in the media as a “controversial” invasion of privacy, then finally highlighting
how it has been reinscribed through a number of artistic practices that draw attention to its
affective and imaginative qualities. Thus I argue that Street View cannot be assigned any
intrinsic meaning or logic, but rather is open to constant reinterpretation, and while novel in
its precise form, must be placed in a longer-run context of efforts to objectify and represent
the world around us.
Total word count: 14995 words.

ii. Acknowledgments
Thanks go to all who have assisted me over the course of this project:
My supervisor, Dr Veronica della Dora, for her enthusiasm, advice and support;
Jennie Meredith, for her insightful comments during tutorials, and healthy scepticism
towards all things technological;
Dr Mark Jackson, Ivan Wu, Jon Wringe, Caroline Wright, Won-Seob Song for their
suggestions and lively discussion at the MSc reading group;
Bill Guffey, and especially Jon Rafman, for giving up their time to provide me with invaluable
information.
This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, Peter Swann, although in his eyes, an

Ordnance Survey map can never be bettered.
iii. Contents
iv. List of Tables .......................................................................................................................... 6

v. List of Figures ......................................................................................................................... 7
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 8
1.1. Why Google Street View? ............................................................................................... 8
1.2. Methodology................................................................................................................. 10
1.2.1. Visual ethnography ................................................................................................ 11
1.2.2. Discourse analysis .................................................................................................. 12
1.2.3. Interviews............................................................................................................... 13
1.3. Outline .......................................................................................................................... 15
2. Representing the world ....................................................................................................... 16
2.1. The cartographic gaze ................................................................................................... 16
2.2. Critical cartography: representational and post-representational............................... 19
2.3. More-than-representational mappings ........................................................................ 21
3. Contextualising Street View: a new mode of mapping? ...................................................... 23
3.1. “Is Google good for geography”?.................................................................................. 24
3.2. Beyond the fear-hope dialectic..................................................................................... 27
4. Street View in focus ............................................................................................................. 29
4.1. Experiencing Street View .............................................................................................. 29
4.2. The virtual flâneur ......................................................................................................... 32
5. Contesting Street View ........................................................................................................ 36
5.1. Maps, surveillance and privacy ..................................................................................... 36
5.2. Survey/Surveillance ...................................................................................................... 38
5.3. Representation/Misrepresentation .............................................................................. 40
5.4. Use/Abuse ..................................................................................................................... 42
5.5. An Invasion of Privacy? ................................................................................................. 44
6. Rethinking Street View......................................................................................................... 45
6.1. Street View as virtual travel .......................................................................................... 46
6.2. Street View as self-expression ...................................................................................... 48
6.3. Street View as modern experience ............................................................................... 50
6.4. Multiple meanings ........................................................................................................ 54
7. Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 55
7.1. A world-as-picture ........................................................................................................ 57
7.2. Where next?.................................................................................................................. 58

8. Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 60
Appendix A ............................................................................................................................... 76
A.i. Semi-structured Interview schedule for Jon Rafman .................................................... 76
A.ii. Interview Transcript ...................................................................................................... 78
Appendix B ............................................................................................................................... 89
iv. List of Tables
1.1. Sources for discourse analysis p14

v. List of Figures
1.1. The familiar and the exotic in Google Street View p9
1.2. Guidelines for discourse analysis p12
3.1. Google Maps p25
3.2. Google Earth p26
4.1. Three visual representations of Jacob’s Wells Road, Bristol, from Google Maps p31
4.2. Moments in time captured by Google Street View p33
4.3. Times Square, New York represented in Street View, and by an overhead
satellite image p34
5.1. “Report a concern” on Google Street View p37
5.2. British Special Air Service base, Credenhill, Herefordshire p42
6.1. Bill Guffey’s Street View art websites p47
6.2. Scenes from Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, staged as part of the Street With a View
project p49
6.3. Examples of scenes from Street View used by Jon Rafman p52
1. Introduction
“Street View takes mapping to a level not possible before” (Ed Parsons, Google Geospatial
Technologist)
“we are confident that the Street View system must be regarded as operating outside of the law”
(Simon Davies, Director, Privacy International)
“Google Street View is a great manifestation of the present view of reality, which is a “Google-ised
1
reality” (Jon Rafman, new media artist)
Maps are changing. As computers and the Internet become ever-more deeply embedded in
the fabric of everyday life, “the ways we visualize and understand the world around us – its
places, geographies, and relationships – are undergoing a radical transformation”
(Crampton, 2010: p38). It has been argued that cartography is undergoing a profound
epistemic break, as people’s everyday experience of maps is increasingly not of static,
printed, durable map objects, but of interactive, transient, online mapping environments
(Crampton, 2003a). In this context, Internet behemoth Google has established itself as a
major player in the burgeoning field of online mapping, and in May 2007 launched its most
ambitious and innovative project to date: Google Street View. Integrated into the existing
Google Maps and Google Earth platforms, Street View “takes mapping to a level not possible
before” (Google, 2010a), by representing the world not from the “God’s eye” view of a
“conventional” map or satellite image, but from a decidedly more human street-level
perspective. Thus during the last three years, Google has commissioned a fleet of cars, vans,
and even trikes fitted with GPS systems, laser scanners and a set of nine cameras to produce
360° panoramic photographs of the world’s streets, which are then digitally stitched
together to produce an interactive, navigable mapping environment (Figure 1.1.).
1.1. Why Google Street View?
Google Street View presents an interesting and pertinent focus for research for three
primary reasons. First, while there is a growing body of work engaging with current
transformations in the technologies and practices of mapping (Crampton, 2009), the relative
1
Ed Parsons quoted in Google (2010a); Davies (2009); Jon Rafman from interview (2010).
novelty of Street View means that this particular mapping environment has not yet been
examined from a critical geographical perspective. Second, I would argue that this absence
needs to be addressed due to the extent to which Street View has attracted the interest of
Figure 1.1 The familiar and the exotic in Google Street View. [Top] School of Geographical Sciences, University
Road, Bristol; [Bottom] Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco. The top image shows the default mode of viewing
Street View, displaying the Google search term, navigational arrows and road, and an inset satellite view.
Alternatively Street View can be experienced in a more immersive way in full screen, without an accompanying
bird’s eye view *bottom+ [Author’s screenshots 14 April 2010]
the general population in a manner that most online mapping tools have not; Google
(2010a) has recorded a 30% increase in visitors to its Maps site since the launch of Street
View, and from personal experience, it is apparent that Street View is being used
increasingly frequently in a range of everyday situations2. Finally, Street View is of particular
interest not just for its popularity, but for its attendant notoriety. Since its UK launch in
2009, it has been almost impossible to see Street View referred to in the media without it
being prefixed by the word “controversial” (e.g. Harvey, 2009; Warman, 2010), an epithet
not often applied to online mapping applications.
If maps can be regarded as “a hinge around which pivot wholes systems of meaning, both
prior and subsequent to its technical and mechanical production” (Cosgrove, 1999: p9), then
it is my intention in this study to gain something of a partial handle on those systems of
meaning that revolve around Google Street View, by considering how this novel mapping
technology, like all others, is constituted through its mutual relations with society
(Crampton, 2003a). My approach is necessarily partial and exploratory, and I will not
attempt to give a comprehensive overview of by whom or for what purpose Street View is
being used, nor canvass public opinion on the technology, even though these remain
pertinent questions. Rather I will focus my analysis around three main aims:
1. To investigate the significance of mapping the world not from an

abstracted, “God’s eye” perspective, but from a street-level viewpoint;
2. To understand and explain the media discourses that have constructed

Street View as “controversial”;
3. To consider how we might look beyond the restrictive purview of these

popular discourses through an examination of more creative modes of
engagement with Street View.
1.2. Methodology
In general terms, this study will follow the approach of “critical cartography”, a perspective
that addresses maps not as neutral mirrors of the world, but as “active means by which
2
Just in the last few weeks I have seen Street View being used as a navigational aid; a means to gain a “sense of place” for
potential holiday destinations; and as a mnemonic device when recounting stories from time spent living in a foreign city.
meanings are produced, circulated and exerted as well as negotiated and contested”
(Pinder, 2003: p173). In this context, I have adopted what I shall refer to as a more-than-
representational approach to maps and mapping, which I explain more fully in Chapter Two.
While acknowledging the continued relevance of social constructionist approaches that have
sought to deconstruct the partial and contingent ways in which maps represent space, I also
wish to look beyond this focus on representation by engaging with the affective, imaginative
and material dimensions of maps. Concurrent with this approach, I have employed a range
of qualitative methods in order to analyse not just Street View itself, but also the discourses
and practices through which it is made meaningful. Accordingly, I acknowledge that my
interpretations are inevitably partial and subjective, and do not imply a singular “true”
reading of Google Street View (Rose, 1997).
1.2.1. Visual ethnography
While most attempts to advance a critical methodology for analysing maps have suggested
approaches such as iconography, discourse analysis, and deconstruction that rely upon a
view of maps as “texts” (e.g. Pinder, 2003), theoretical moves to be more attentive to the
non-representational aspects of maps, and the novel empirical context of online mapping
each present new methodological challenges. In analysing Street View itself, I therefore
adopted an experimental approach that constituted something of a visual ethnography3. My
starting point for analysis was thus based on interpreting my own experiences of using
Street View in a number of deliberately different ways: conducting focused searches;
virtually visiting familiar, iconic, and completely unfamiliar locations; and engaging in virtual
flânerie by interactively navigating within the Street View environment.
Thus rather than focusing solely on a semiotic or iconographic interpretation of the

multitude of images that make up this mapping environment, I aimed to pay attention to the
material, affective and imaginative qualities both of Street View as a virtual “object, and of
the embodied experience of engaging with the technology. Therefore while considering the
visual dimensions of Street View in a manner attentive to the view that an image (or map) is
not just a “representational snapshot”, but also has a “pre-signifying affective materiality”
(Latham and McCormack, 2009: p253), this approach also responds to calls for researchers
3
In some ways this work draws upon the growing number of virtual ethnographies being conducted in various online
spaces. However these studies have focused primarily on participant observation of online interaction between people,
rather than on the software itself (e.g. Williams, 2007; Jordan, 2009).
to employ more “ethnomethodology” in map studies by analysing the “use and practices of
digital mapping systems” (Dodge et al, 2009: p233).
1.2.2. Discourse analysis
Textual analysis, in the form of discourse analysis, was employed primarily in order to
examine how Street View has been discursively constructed as a “controversial” technology,
and to consider how this construction has been challenged by more creative interpretations
of this mapping environment. Discourse analysis seeks to understand how discourses are
constituted and circulated within texts “to produce a particular understanding or knowledge
about the world that is accepted as truth” (Waitt, 2005: p148), and was therefore employed
in order to examine how the meaning of Street View has been “fashioned through a pattern
of discursive structures” (Waitt, 2005: p171) repeated across a collection of texts. Analysis
focused primarily on the newspaper press, using the online archives of British national
newspapers to find and select sources. Additional texts were also obtained from some local
newspapers; the websites of groups who have campaigned against Street View; and from
the website of artists who have worked with Street View. These texts were selected on the
basis of qualitative richness, and in order to gain a range of source, rather than attempting
to analyse every single text about Street View (Table 1.1.). I restricted my focus to the UK, as
there are significant geographical contingencies in the way that Street View has been
received and understood, which in themselves could form the basis of a separate study.
While there is no prescriptive or “standard” approach to discourse analysis (Tonkiss, 2004), I
adopted a set of seven recommended strategies as a general guide to analysis (Figure, 1.2)
(Waitt, 2005; Rose, 2001).
Guidelines for discourse analysis
1. Suspension of existing categories:
2. Familiarisation: immersion in texts through repeated re-reading;
3. Coding: identify key themes and discursive structures without imposing top down cate-
gories;
4. Persuasion: Investigate construction of “truth” claims within texts;
5. Incoherence: note inconsistencies within texts;
6. Active presence of the invisible: look for mechanisms that silence;
7. Social context: when, where, how, why, for whom and by whom was a text produced.
Figure 1.2 Guidelines for discourse analysis (Waitt, 2005; Rose, 2001)
1.2.3. Interviews
Finally, interviews were used in order to bridge knowledge gaps and investigate the complex
motivations and behaviours of key actors involved in debates surrounding Street View
(Dunn, 2005). However, a number of identified potential informants were either unwilling or
unavailable for interview, namely: Ed Parsons, Google Geospatial Technologist; Robin
Hewlett, organiser of the Street with a View project; and representatives from the campaign
groups Privacy International and Big Brother Watch. Interviews were therefore carried out
with two informants, Jon Rafman and Bill Guffey, both artists who have worked with Street
View. Due to the location of both of these informants in North America (Montreal and
Kentucky respectively), conventional face-to-face interviews were impossible, and therefore
I overcame this problem by holding a telephone interview with Jon Rafman, and conducting
an asynchronous email interview with Bill Guffey.
Comparative studies have demonstrated that despite the lack of non-verbal communication,
when the research topic is appropriate, telephone interviews compare favourably to those
conducted face to face in terms of data quality (Sturges and Hanrahan, 2004). Having
contacted Jon Rafman via email, an interview was arranged and conducted using the
Internet phone service Skype, using a semi-structured interview schedule to guide the
conversation (Appendix A.i.). The conversation was recorded with permission and then
Category Title Author Source Date

Newspaper A very English revolt sees off Google’s R. Hardman Daily Mail 6/4/09
Report/Editorial spies
Google Street View: a dangerous Gizmo Anon. Daily Telegraph 19/3/09
Who allowed Google to put my big B. Gordon Daily Telegraph 20/3/09
knickers online
Google view is good for thieves R. Taylor The Sun 12/7/08
Google Street View forced to remove J. Merrick The Independent on Sunday 22/3/09
images
Can Google Street View stay ahead of the S. Webb The Times 2/4/09
privacy lawyers?
Why I want Google to keep its damned H. Phibbs Daily Mail 19/3/09
nose out of my home
Google ‘burglar’s charter’ street D. Derbyshire, Daily Mail 31/7/08
cameras given the all clear by privacy A. Martin
watchdog
You’re not Googling us: The Blairs, House I. Gallagher, T. Daily Mail 22/3/09
of Commons and Google boss won’t have Harper, M.
THEIR privacy invaded on Street View Delgado
Defending the public space M. Cross The Guardian 26/4/09

Just what we needed Google, more T. Blackburn The Sun 11/4/09
cameras
Fears Google Street View could be used to K. Mullan Londonderry Sentinel 28/1/10
plan attacks
Bradenham residents: ‘Google L. Dunhill www.thisislocallondon.co.uk 26/1/10
programme will help burglars’
Honestly, Google, I was only out to lunch R. Nicoll The Observer 22/3/09
Don’t zoom in on Google’s Street View M. Cross The Guardian 7/4/09

Google forced to black out hundreds of Anon. Daily Mail 21/3/09
Street View photos after privacy
protests – but site gets record number of
visits
Village Mob thwarts Google Street View M. Ahmed The Times 3/4/09
car
Ashleigh Hall captured on Street View just Anon. Daily Mail 17/3/10
weeks before she was killed by facebook
predator
Fury as Google puts the SAS’s secret base Anon. Daily Mail 20/3/2010
on Street View in ‘very serious security
breach’
Google Street View criticised for Anon. The Telegraph 20/3/10
‘showing images of secret SAS
headquarters’
SAS base images to stay on Google Street Anon. The Times 20/3/10
View
Other media The Battle of Broughton R. Cellan-Jones BBC “dot.life” Blog 3/4/09
report
Campaign Group Complaint: Google Street View S. Davies Privacy International 23/3/09
Material technology
Google Street View A. Deane Big Brother Watch 12/3/10
Want out of Google’s all seeing eys? E. Hockings Big Brother Watch 25/2/10
Google Material Can you “identify” the person walking P. Fleischer “Peter Fleischer: Privacy…?” 23/10/07
down the street? Blog
Street View and Privacy P. Fleischer Google LatLong Blog 24/9/07
Street View Street With a View project brings real Street With a Press Release from 10/10/08
artists public art to the virtual streets – in Google View www.streetwithaview.com
Maps Street View
Introduction: Sixteen Google Street Views Jon Rafman Text from Sixteen Google Street 2009
Views book; obtained from
author
The Nine Eyes of Google Street View Jon Rafman Art Fag City blog 12/8/09
Table 1.1. Sources for discourse analysis

manually transcribed (Appendix A.ii.), before being analysed adopting the method of
discourse analysis outlined above. For Bill Guffey, an asynchronous email interview was
carried out, a method that while lacking the interactivity of a verbal interview, is
advantageous in allowing informants to take time to develop their answers and respond at
their own convenience (Kivits, 2005; James and Busher, 2006). Having made initial contact
with Bill Guffey explaining the purpose of my research, I sent a set of questions in one email,
receiving replies a few days later (Appendix B). Ultimately, while this method generated a
substantially less rich set of answers than the telephone interview due to the inability to
probe the informant, both methods were able to overcome the constraints of distance and
enable me to obtain useful information that I would not otherwise have been able to access.
1.3. Outline
This study is organised into six further chapters. In Chapters Two and Three I will set this
study in context, first by providing a theoretical framework in which I highlight the
significance afforded the visual representation of space and outline a more-than-
representational approach to cartography, before then outlining the emerging field of
Internet mapping. In Chapter Four I focus in depth on Street View itself, giving an auto-
ethnographic account of the technology that emphasises the manner in which it produces a
strong “sense of place”, yet produces a detached gaze akin to that of a “virtual flâneur”. In
Chapters Five and Six I turn to examine Street View in its wider context. First, I examine how
and why Street View has been discursively constructed as a surveillant technology and an
invasion of privacy at each stage of the mapping process, before demonstrating the
possibility of moving beyond these debates by analysing a number of artistic projects that
have engaged with Street View in a manner that highlights its affective and imaginative
qualities, whilst also opening up space for a more nuanced critical interpretation. Finally, in
Chapter Seven I will conclude by suggesting that Street View cannot be assigned any singular
meaning, but is open to constant reinterpretation, before returning to situate this new
technology within the wider context of the visual representation of space.
2. Representing the world
Historically, the production and circulation of geographical knowledge has been closely
associated with the visual image in a number of forms (Cosgrove, 2008; Rose, 2003; Driver,
2003), with some even suggesting that geographical space can be defined precisely as space
that “can be seen, or at least visualized” (Cosgrove, 2008: p15). It is therefore evident that
“the ways in which the world has been represented visually have, historically, been
important elements of the ways in which we come to understand and act upon the world”
(Pickles, 2004: p9). Geographical representations are not inert, passive objects, but “active,
constitutive elements in shaping social and spatial practices” (Cosgrove, 2008: p15), whose
rhetorical power plays a crucial role in the construction of the geographical imagination –
“the mechanism by which people come to know the world and situate themselves in space
and time” (Schwartz and Ryan, 2003: p6). Thus in a contemporary context in which “visual
images have unprecedented communicative significance” (Cosgrove, 1999: p4), the manner
in which space and place are represented graphically remains highly pertinent.
In this chapter, I will outline a theoretical framework within which to situate this study of
Google Street View. First, I will consider the ways in which the contrasting perspectives
employed in different visual representations have been held to foster different conceptions
of space, before focusing on the map as the visual form most readily associated with
geographical knowledge. Subsequently, while highlighting the imbrication of the “God’s eye”
view of the map with the totalising imperial gaze, I wish to also complicate the assumption
that an aerial perspective automatically implies this association, and that a map must adopt
this vantage point. Working with a broad conception of the cartographic image, I will further
complicate the notion of a map by problematizing the question of representation itself.
Employing insights from critical cartographic theory, I will synthesise work that has
reconceptualised the map both as an always partial, power laden cultural text amenable to
deconstruction (Harley, 1989), and more recently as a constellation of on-going processes
and practices (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007), in order to outline a more-than-representational
approach to mapping that will guide this study.
2.1. The cartographic gaze
If the visual has long been central to geographical thought, then more generally the
privileging of vision and sight is at the heart of the social imaginary of modernity, which has
been historically underpinned by the “cartographic gaze”, implying a “Cartesian
commitment to vision as the privileged source of ‘direct’ information about the world”
(Pickles, 2004: p78). Many have recognised the close relationship between geographical
knowledge and the technologies of vision – both material and social – that underpin the
particular constellation of “ways of seeing” that emerged in the modern era. For example,
Denis Cosgrove (1985: 1988) has argued that the theoretical development of linear
perspective facilitated the rise of the landscape “way of seeing” that offered an illusion of
control and order to a powerful, detached, individual observer, and as such provided a visual
ideology that rendered space amenable to physical appropriation as private property.
Likewise, the myriad of representational forms that emerged in the nineteenth century,
from simple photographs to dioramas, panoramas and even spectacular world exhibitions,
served to structure a modern view of the “world-as-picture, -as-exhibition, -as-museum, and
-as-miniature” (Pickles, 2004: p137). Thus the capacity of photography to dislocate space
and time was repeated in these technologies that reconstituted the visual spectacle of
representations of far-away places as both sources of pleasure, and commodities for
consumption; “the cartographic eye had become a central element of cultural consumption
and technological innovation” (Pickles, 2004: p139; Clarke and Doel, 2005; Arnold, 2009).
If these modern technologies of vision are underpinned by a cartographic gaze, then the
apotheosis of this mentality can be found in that that quintessential visualisation of
geographical knowledge: the map. As Cosgrove (1999: p13) argues, mapping practices have
provided a “vital entry point” into an appreciation of the changing mentalities of Western
modernity. Commonly defined as “a representation of a part of the earth's surface” from a
planar, aerial viewpoint (Wood and Krygier, 2009)4, the map is historically indelibly linked to
geographical thought (Pickles, 2004; Cosgrove, 2008)5. To envisage the world as represented
by the cartographic image is to adopt:
an atypical position, one that disorients the viewer through an absolute abstraction,
an experience of being in two places at once, in which both the gaze and the
intellect are torn away from their physical body and the physical laws of this body's
presences on the earth. (Jacob, 2006: p110)
4
Based on a survey of definitions of the English word 'map' over the period 1649-1996.
5
Although not necessarily in current academic scholarship, for see Dodge and Perkins, 2008.
For Pickles (2004), this cartographic gaze, underpinned by an observer epistemology and the
aforementioned Cartesian privileging of vision, is central to modern thought. Thus maps
have historically been closely associated with a particular modern way of seeing – distanced,
objective and penetrating – that is “predicated on an epistemology and politics of mastery
and control of earth, nature and subjects” (Pickles, 2004: p83).
The cartographic gaze has subsequently been strongly associated with the exercise of power.
Given its dependence on an impossible omniscient view, “what no eye could ever see”
(Jacob, 2006: p2), many commentators have appealed to divine metaphors to encapsulate
this disembodied perspective: this is the “gaze of the Creator” (Jacob, 2006: p325); the
“Apollonian Eye” (Cosgrove, 1994; 2001); or the vision of the “voyeur-god” (de Certeau,
1984: p93). As a result of both this “God's eye” view, and the particular materiality of the
map, allowing as it does the physical domination of vast expanses of space (Edney, 2009),
the synoptic visuality afforded by the cartographic gaze has been equated with not just
visual, but intellectual mastery of territory (Jacob, 2006; Edney, 2009; Pickles, 2004).
Therefore the view from above has historically been closely associated with the exercise of
imperial power; representing the world as an abstracted order set logically before a
disembodied viewer in a manner that dehumanises the landscape and thus renders it
amenable to conquest and the imposition of colonial rationality (Blomley, 2003; Gregory
2004).
However, to adjudge the representation of the world from above as only ever conducive to
the imperial eye would be unnecessarily reductive. As Cosgrove (2001) recognises, the view
from above may be empowering, but it is also visionary, lending representations of the earth
from this perspective a powerful poetic and imaginative quality, where dreams of ascent to
an omniscient viewpoint are associated as much with the Stoic notion of “human
insignificance in the vastness of creation” (2001: p27) as with imperial desire. Similarly,
Jacob (2006) argues that the “vertical gaze” of the map has resonance beyond the narrowly
political, satisfying the human desire for completeness and totality by providing the pleasure
of seeing the world as a closed entity. The cartographic gaze can even be ludic and
ephemeral, “not only an appropriation of space, but also a projection of the person among
the pictograms” (Jacob, 2006: p383) that allows the viewer to lose oneself in the “labyrinth
of the world” (p325), engaging in the imaginative drift of a “voyage reduced to the gaze”
(p333). Thus while the God's eye view of the map might be totalising and imperialistic, it is
not necessarily so. Recognising the ambiguities inherent in the cartographic gaze is
important, as it highlights the lack of fixity or universality in the meanings attributed to any
way of representing space.
While a map is commonly held as that which represents the world from above, it is
necessary to problematize this elision of object and perspective by recognising the diversity
of ways in which artefacts understood as maps have represented space. Precisely defining
what does and does not constitute a map is perhaps an impossible task, and it is therefore
more productive to recognise that a “map” has no innate characteristics, but rather that its
definition is a historically and geographically contingent discursive construct (Edney, 2009:
p12). While some have even extended the notion of mapping to the exclusively mental and
performative, I do wish to retain the notion of the map as a graphical representation, as
some form of “visible image of the (or at least a) world” (Cosgrove, 2008: p2). However, that
is not to say that a map inherently denotes a planar representation, rather that it is this form
that has been naturalised as a “conventional” map. Historically, there has been a litany of
exceptions to this convention, with many maps blurring the boundaries between the aerial
view and other perspectives, from colonial mappings of tropical coastlines (Martins, 1999) to
early modern townscapes (Cosgrove, 2008: p172). As such, the diversity of visual spatial
representations that have been analysed under the rubric of mappings is huge (Cosgrove,
1999), and thus while its precise form may be novel, Street View has many precedents:
“there is no single essential ‘look of maps’” (Crampton, 2010: p44).
2.2. Critical cartography: representational and post-representational
Having acknowledged that the definition of a map is complex, and that the map is not
limited to a definite visual form, it is also necessary to question what it means to refer to a
map as a representation of a portion of the earth's surface. In recent years, the positivist
assumption that maps are scientific and objective “truth documents” that represent the
world as faithfully as possible (Kitchin et al, 2009: p4) has increasingly been challenged by
the emergence of an alternative current of thought known as “critical cartography”, which
takes as central an explicit questioning of what is meant by representation (Crampton,
2010). Two strands of though can be identified in this tradition, which, following Kitchin et al
(2009), I will term representational critical cartography and post-representational critical
cartography.
Representational critical cartography does not at base reject the notion that maps are
representations of a portion of the earth's surface, but recognises that this act of
representation can never be neutral or objective, but rather is innately subjective and
power-laden. In representing the world, maps do not merely reflect a pre-existing reality,
but actively create knowledge and produce space (Crampton, 2010). Central to inaugurating
this approach to cartography was the late J. B. Harley, who through an eclectic embrace of
social theory, in particular the work of Derrida and Foucault, sought to bring about an
epistemological shift in the interpretation of maps by breaking “the assumed link between
reality and representation” (Harley, 1989: p2). For Harley, the positivist claims of
cartographers that the map could be an objective representation of reality were untenable:
he recognised that there is no such thing as a “true” map, but that all maps were socially
constructed, and as such were always rhetorical, ideological, and partial instruments of
power (Harley, 1988; 1989). This understanding of maps lies at the heart of many
subsequent critical studies, characterised by a non-progressivist view of the history of
cartography, and close attention to the association of maps with practices of power (Harley,
1992; Edney, 1997).
However, for some this approach stops short of fundamentally destabilising the notion of a
map as a representation of space, as maps remain “secure as spatial representations that
say something about spatial relations in the world” (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: p334). Post-
representational critical cartography therefore aims to do away with the notion that maps
“represent” anything. For instance, Wood and Krygier (2009) suggest that defining the map
as a representation naturalises, universalises, and obscures its origins; a map is not a
representation at all, but a proposition, which does not reflect a pre-exisiting reality, but
affirms the existence of everything on it. Much post-representational work privileges
analysis of the processes of mapping over the map object, and the way in which these
processes shape the knowledge claims that mapping makes (Cosgrove, 2008: p159). More
recently, this “processual turn” in critical cartography (Harris and Hazen, 2009: p53) has
sought to reinterpret maps themselves as “constellations of ongoing processes” (Kitchin et
al, 2009: p16) that do not constitute an ontologically secure, stable product, but are
ontogenetic in nature, brought into being only through practice (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007).
Research in a post-representational vein therefore seeks not to deconstruct the meaning of
the map, but to analyse how the map “brings space into being” through situated socio-
spatial practices (p339).
2.3. More-than-representational mappings
It seems therefore that we have reached a position where the notion of a map, far from
being simply defined, is not at all secure. The cartographic gaze is often ambiguous; the map
lacks any definitive visual form; and even its ontological status has been called into question.
How therefore, do we elucidate an approach to maps and mapping to guide this study?
Rather than theorising maps as either static visual representations to be deconstructed, or as
mutable, mobile subjects lacking ontological security, I wish to take an approach to
cartography that recognises the importance, and the inseparability of both representation
and practice. Following debates elsewhere in human geography (Lorimer, 2005), I wish to
term this a more-than-representational approach to maps and mapping, an approach that is
equally applicable to online mapping environments as it is to “conventional” map objects.
First, while rejecting any possibility that a map can ever be an objective “mirror of nature”, I
do not wish to dismiss the notion that mapping, albeit in an always partial, contingent
manner, “remains a way of representing the world” (Cosgrove, 2008: p2, own emphasis).
Indeed, even proponents of a “processual” approach to maps, whilst arguing that
cartography is not a representational science, seem unwilling to completely let go of the
notion of a map as a “spatial representation created by cartographers”, even if they argue
that this representation is only brought into being as a “map” through individual practices
(Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: p338). In other words the map works precisely because it has an
external referent, it allows us to “make connections to other representations and to other
experienced spaces” (Del Casino and Hanna, 2006: p36). Therefore to neglect the politics of
representation inherent in any map, or in any practice of mapping (where representation is
in itself a practice), is to severely limit the scope for analysis. What a map represents, and
how the map represents space, remains of crucial significance.
However, recognising that maps remain important for how they represent space does not
foreclose an engagement with the realm of practice. A map is not merely a representation, it
is more than a representation: it also has a materiality, as “a physical surface encountered
and performed by the user” (della Dora, 2009a: p250), and an affective dimension, that
“draw(s) us in imaginatively and emotionally” (Crane and Aitken, 2009: p152). Furthermore,
any analysis must extend beyond a narrow focus on the map object to also pay attention to
the process of mapping, from the method of survey (Cosgrove, 2008), to the manner in
which all maps are “infused with meaning through contested, complex, intertextual , and
interrelated sets of socio-spatial practices” (Del Casino and Hanna, 2006: p36).
Acknowledging that cartography is more-than-representational suggests a more open-ended
reading of maps and mapping that avoids the risk of lapsing into “reductionist readings of
the power of and in maps” (Pickles, 2004: p30), and is instead attentive to their “partial,
open, and contingent qualities” (Cosgrove, 1999: p14).
3. Contextualising Street View: a new mode of mapping?
Before addressing Google Street View itself, it is necessary to situate this novel visual
representation of space in the context of recent developments in Web-based mapping
technologies and practices. This section will therefore introduce online mapping as a socially
and technologically contingent “mode” of cartography, before focusing on the integral role
of Google in this emerging field. Highlighting Google’s “Maps” and “Earth” products as key
examples of the new Web cartography, I will trace how geographers have largely interpreted
these technologies within a binary logic of democratic possibility against surveillance and
corporate control, before introducing Kingsbury and Jones’ (2009) suggestions for a more
open reading of novel forms of mapping.
The Internet has “fundamentally altered the world of maps” (Plewe, 2007: p133). While the
history of online cartography is nearly as old as the Web itself6, in the last five years there
has been an explosion in both the number of websites and applications dedicated to
mapping, and in the number of users engaging with these technologies. These new web
cartographies take many forms, from simple personalised road maps to encyclopaedic digital
globes, map “mashups” that combine disparate data sources, and even attempts to map the
world relying entirely on volunteered geographical information (Crampton, 2009; 2010;
Graham, forthcoming; Haklay et al, 2008)7. Adopting a non-progressivist perspective, these
new technologies and practices are best characterised as an emerging “mode” of mapping;
not better than what has gone before, but articulating different cartographic techniques and
different conceptions of space, whilst also being intimately tied to their particular social and
technological context (Crampton, 2003a; Edney, 1993). For Crampton (2003a), this new
mode of mapping constitutes an epistemic break in the history of cartography; a shift from
the largely static, durable map object, towards an interactive, transient, mapping
environment, where the boundaries between map producer and map user, and between the
map and other forms of information, are being radically redefined (Monmonier, 2007:
p372).
6
Online mapping is traceable to the Xerox PARC Map Viewer (1993), with publicly accessible websites MapQuest and
Multimap launching in 1995 (see Haklay et al, 2008).
7
Mappings produced through user collaboration, or through the reworking of existing data sets have become known as
“neogeography”.
3.1. “Is Google good for geography”8?
While these new Web cartographies are highly diverse, Internet giant Google has played an
integral role in the development of the “GeoWeb”. Founded in California in 1998, Google’s
self-stated mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible
and useful” (Google, 2010b). From its origins as an Internet search engine, Google has grown
to become one of the world’s biggest technology companies, and in 2005 added online
mapping to its portfolio. Prior to the launch of Street View, the company’s contribution to
mapping consisted of two products. Google Maps offers both satellite imagery and a
conventional topographical map that allows the user to search for spatially referenced
information, or simply explore, through an interactive interface accessible through a web
browser9 (Figure 3.1). Google Earth is a standalone software application that takes the form
of a 3D digital globe based on satellite imagery, and also provides access to numerous
additional data layers such as user-contributed photographs, 3D models of buildings, and
encyclopaedia entries10 (Figure 3.2). Five years after their launch, Google Maps and Earth, by
virtue of presenting “a combination and refinement of incremental innovations that make
online mapping much more accessible to a wide range of people” (Zook and Graham, 2007a:
p1326), have become the world’s most popular online virtual globes; “an everyday part of
life for many computer users” (Crampton, 2009: p92).
As Google Maps and Google Earth have become increasingly ubiquitous, geographers have
begun to consider the significance of the role that these visual spatial representations are
beginning to play in people’s everyday lives. For many, the free, relatively sophisticated,
easy to use mapping tools that Google offer are exciting developments that are re-engaging
the public with cartography, with some even suggesting, perhaps naively, that Google has
“done more for geography” than any company before it (Hudson-Smith et al, 2009a: p141;
2009b). Of particular interest to many researchers has been the democratising potential of
Google Maps in allowing the creation of “map mashups”, whereby any spatially referenced
data can be combined with the Google base layer to create a new, personalised map, a
development that some have argued goes a long way towards meeting the demands of an
8
(Crampton, 2010: p129)
9
Accessible at www.maps.google.co.uk (UK site)
10
Google Earth can be downloaded at http://earth.google.co.uk/ (UK site)
Figure 3.1. Google Maps *Top+ Google Maps UK homepage, with “Map” layer selected; *Bottom+ Results of
Google Maps query for “university of bristol school of geographical sciences”, showing satellite view with
labels, and search results to the left [Author’s screenshots, 11 February 2010]
Figure 3.2. Google Earth [Top] Google Earth start-up screen showing only base layer of satellite imagery (UK-
centred); [Bottom] University of Bristol, showing user-added photographs and Wikipedia entries, example
photograph selected [Author’s screenshots, 22 February 2010].
oft-theorised “GIS/2”11 (Miller, 2006). Others have argued that democratising potential also
resides in the free availability of high-resolution satellite images that Google Earth permits,
for example in the ability of the public to view “secret spaces” and thus subvert the interests
of elite groups (Perkins and Dodge, 2009), or in empowering transnational advocacy
networks vis-à-vis nation states by widening their access to information and their
possibilities for communication (Aday and Livingston, 2009).
Others have approached Google’s forays into cartography with greater scepticism. Zook and
Graham (2007a; 2007b) have questioned the emancipatory possibilities of Google Maps and
Google Earth by stressing that Google’s formulation of “DigiPlace12” is “fundamentally
undemocratic and private” (Zook and Graham, 2007a: p1332), in that the power to include
and exclude information, and thus shape perceptions of place, ultimately rests with a
private, for-profit corporation. Others have levelled their critique at the actual visual
representations produced by Google Earth and Maps. For instance, Parks (2009: p544)
suggests that there has been “too much congratulatory discourse around Google Earth”, and
highlights how the program’s “Crisis in Darfur” layer does little more than reproduce
western tropes of African tragedy. Other interpretations resonate more closely with
previous critiques of the cartographic gaze, with some arguing for the need to question the
“naturalizing power” of its interface, and to guard against the assumption that the detached,
God’s Eye view of satellite imagery represents a faithful facsimile of the real world (Dodge
and Perkins, 2009; Goodchild, 2008). Thus rather than it being an empowering tool, some
readings of Google Earth gone so far as to place it in the same sphere as military satellite
imagery, as a tool that allows users to “appropriate a form of control” by way of a
“totalizing, objectifying transcendent gaze” (Harris, 2006: p119).
3.2. Beyond the fear-hope dialectic
Interpretations of Google Maps and Google Earth therefore appear polarised between an
embrace of the emancipatory possibilities of allowing users to produce their own maps and
gain a reverse-panoptic window on the world on one hand, and concern about the
implications of a detached, God’s eye perspective, mediated by a private corporation, on the
11
Understood as “a geospatial information platform upon which non-GIScientists, but nonetheless interested parties can
read, write, alter, store, test, represent, and present information in ways that they desire and in formats and
environments they understand” (Miller, 2006: p188)
12
Defined as “cartographies that result from the melding of data located and ranked in cyberspace with people’s
understandings and use of physical places” (Zook and Graham, 2007a: p1323)
other. Kingsbury and Jones (2009) characterise this binary determination as a “fear-hope
dialectic”, a rigid determination that interprets Google Earth, as with other cartographies
before it, as always either emancipatory or constaining, a logic that often implies a “one-to-
one mapping of technology onto epistemology” (p504). In contrast, drawing on Benjamin’s
open-ended approach to technology, and Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Dionysian
impulse of excess, disorder and uncertainty, they advance a reading of Google Earth that is
not constrained by this binary logic, but understands this mapping environment as “an
uncertain orb spangled with vertiginous paranoia, frenzied navigation, jubilatory dissolution,
and intoxicating giddiness” (p503). While not explicitly couched in such terms, this
understanding of Google Earth resonates with the more-than-representational approach to
mapping that I outline above, emphasizing the often poetic and occasionally bizarre images
that result from this mode of visually representing space, whilst also considering the
practices of virtual exploration and discussion that the software stimulates. It is thus with
this ethos in mind that I turn to consider Google’s latest cartographic innovation: Street
View.
4. Street View in focus
Accessible through both Google Maps and Google Earth, Street View extends the
possibilities of the digital map by representing the world not from above, but from the
perspective of the street. In the company’s own words: “We like to think of Street View as
being the last zoom layer on the map – when you’ve zoomed all the way in you find yourself
virtually standing on the street” (Google, 2010c, own emphasis). Launched in May 2007 in
five US cities, Google has since expanded its street level mapping programme at a rapid rate
across the (developed) world13, launching in several cities in the UK in March 2009, before
being extended to cover 95% of the country’s roads in March 2010. Street View offers 360°
panoramic images captured by a fleet of Google vehicles – vans, cars, and now trikes – fitted
with a nine-directional camera and a GPS unit. While there is a somewhat surprisingly long
history of attempts to map the urban environment at street level through film and
photography, these projects have been small in scope and limited in their sophistication and
accessibility (Lippman, 1980; Vincent, 2007; Cartwright, 2008). Street View dramatically
supersedes these predecessors in terms of quality, accessibility, and its ultimate aim to map
every public road possible (Williams, 2010).
In this section, I do not want to dwell on the technical details of Google Street View, but
instead wish to consider the significance of “virtually standing on the street” in the broader
context of cartographic representations and practices. This analysis is based primarily on my
own experience of using Street View, and is thus an inevitably partial interpretation, yet one
which I hope to use as a starting point from which to engage with the wider discourses and
practices that have become associated with this technology, which will be addressed in
Chapters Five and Six.
4.1. Experiencing Street View
Loading the Google Maps homepage14, I am presented with the now familiar satellite view of
Western Europe, gazing upon the Earth from a lofty height with a detached “Apollonian
Eye”. In the blank search bar I type the address of my house in Bristol, and immediately I am
13
At the time of writing, Street View imagery is available for parts of USA, Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Spain, Portugal,
Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore,
Australia and New Zealand, but this list is being updated regularly. See
http://www.google.co.uk/help/maps/streetview/where-is-street-view.html. Note the overwhelmingly Western bias of
current coverage.
14
www.maps.google.co.uk
hovering lower, suspended above a city represented through a combination of naturalistic

satellite imagery and labels and symbols more reminiscent of the traditional topographical
map, indicating places of interest selected by the Google map-makers and their “black
boxes” of software code (Zook and Graham, 2007a). However, Google’s “DigiPlace” is no
longer limited to representing the world from this disembodied view from above. In the top
left hand corner of the map image is a symbol depicting a human figure, the “pegman”.
Clicking and dragging this figure onto the map image, the streets of Bristol are briefly
illuminated, indicating Street View coverage, until on selecting a location, I am presented
with a different kind of image, a photographic representation of my street, taken from a
position in the middle of the road. No longer am I gazing from the detached, position of the
cartographic voyeur, but am instead viewing the city from the street, still disembodied, but
virtually occupying a position as if within the map (Figure 4.1.).
Unlike with most precisely framed photographic images, in Street View my gaze is not
restricted to a single view. Although I do not move from my chair, exploring this interactive
mapping environment remains an embodied performance. Manipulating the mouse, that
familiar prosthetic attachment whose movement of the pointer on the screen has replaced
physical contact between finger and map in guiding the gaze (della Dora, 2009a: p251), from
my virtual position on the street I can rotate the view, spinning through 360° to see all
around my fixed position in the centre of the road, or even zoom in on features that catch
my attention. A few finger-taps on the keyboard produce the impression of gliding along the
city streets, passing almost seamlessly to the next point on the map, situated a mere few
metres away in “real” space, around which a new panoramic view is centred. All the while I
am held in an attentive disposition by the computer screen, an object whose materiality is
barely registered in our daily lives as we focus only on the images it shows, but whose ability
to display visual representations that I can directly manipulate creates a different mode of
visuality to the paper map: a sense of movement closer to the phenomenon of lived
experience (Introna and Ilharco, 2006; Ash 2009; Ash et al, 2009).
In contrast to the cold, formal abstraction of the “conventional” cartographic image, Street
View renders visible a multitude of details that could never be represented by a typical
planar map view, capturing all that is visible at a moment in space and time. Whereas the
topographic map reduces the city street to a mere symbolic line, (see Figure 4.1), Street
View captures a wealth of individual moments frozen in time, the daily events of city life
Figure 4.1. Three visual representations of Jacob’s Wells Road, Bristol from Google Maps, *Top+
topographical map; [Middle] satellite image; [Bottom] Street View [Author’s screenshots, 22 February
2010]
reduced to a purely visual register. If the God’s Eye view dehumanises the landscape and
renders it rational and ordered, then the street level representation of the world is quite
different: this is a landscape that is full of human activity and lacking in rational coherence.
Exploring Jacob’s Wells Road in Street View, numerous ephemeral moments are on view: a
street cleaner sweeping the road; water trickling down the street as a window cleaner sets
about his work (Figure 4.2.). These mundane moments of urban experience constitute a
populated, living visual landscape, captured and represented to the world via the Internet.
Street View has an unpredictability that other maps do not; even when viewing familiar
places I am unsure what I might find. Yet this mapping environment remains far from a
facsimile of the real world; the top story of my house is strangely blurry and out of
alignment with the rest of the building, and the weather changes dramatically between
locations just a few metres apart as a result of the Google car passing at different times,
reminding the viewer that, as ever, “true” representation remains impossible.
4.2. The virtual flâneur
If virtually experiencing a street that I have walked up and down hundreds of times is
reassuringly familiar, then Street View also extends the possibilities that maps give in
allowing us to “live a voyage reduced to the gaze” (Jacob, 2006: p333), reinscribing the
possibilities of deriving pleasure from the visual spectacle of representations of faraway
places, just as panoramas and world exhibitions did in the nineteenth century (Pickles,
2000). Like countless cartographic and landscape representations before it, Street View has
a “liberating spatiality…an ability to take the viewer further, visually and imaginatively”
(della Dora, 2009b: p337), without moving from their position in front of the computer
screen. A few key-strokes and mouse-clicks allow me to engage in any number of “imaginary
drifts” (Jacob, 2006: p333), flitting between iconic and exotic locations with ease. If this is
equally possible with a paper atlas, or Google Earth’s satellite imagery, what distinguishes
Street View is the powerful sense of place, and much richer imagined geography, that is
generates in the mind of the virtual traveller. Compare the Street View of Times Square,
New York, with the satellite image of the same location15 (Figure 4.3). While the God’s Eye
view of the satellite image gives little sense of the city below, the Street View image shows
15
I chose Times Square because it is the default location when Street View is accessed through Google’s US Street View
page (http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/maps/streetview/). The default street views for different countries invite
some interesting reflections on landscapes of national identity; compare for example the capitalist paradise of Times
Square (US), the manicured gentility of Kew Gardens (UK), or an open vista combining the city, the ocean and the
mountains (Canada).
Figure 4.2. [Top and Middle] Moments in time captured by Google Street View; [Bottom] Blurred houses and
gaps in telephone lines demonstrating Street View’s imperfections. [Author’s Screenshots, 22 February
2010]
detail the crowded streets, gaudy advertisements, fast food restaurants and yellow taxis that
produce an evocative representation of this iconic American landscape.
Figure 4.3. Times Square, New York represented in Street View, and by an overhead satellite image (Author’s
Screenshots 22 February 2010)
Yet the Street View explorer is not limited to viewing cities only through their iconic sites,
but is able to “virtually wander” (Frome et al, 2009) “with the freedom of a vagabond”
(Jacob, 2006: p333). If for Kingsbury and Jones (2009: pp504-505), the “Google Earthling” is
akin to the figure of the flâneur, “an anonymous wandering detective, an active spectator
whose meanderings over the landscape are guided in parts by the former’s ‘distracted
attentions’ and in other parts by the latter’s web-produced ‘attentive distractions’”, then
this parallel is even more pronounced for the Street View user. From my virtual location in
Times Square I can wander through the city streets as I wish, quickly finding myself away
from the crowd in a quiet alleyway. Navigating without reference to the overhead view of
the planar map, it is easy to get lost in Street View’s virtual world: the city quickly becomes
opaque and illegible, in stark contrast to the familiar omniscience of the cartographic gaze
that renders the world knowable and controllable. Yet unlike the wandering pedestrian in
the material city, the virtual flâneur “need not grow tired of a long walk home when one is
lost…one can just jump out of the situation” (Featherstone, 1998: p922); the Street View
user’s immersion in the city is never complete, but remains purely visual, and is ultimately
restricted by the extent of Google’s imagery. Furthermore, if for the nineteenth centuty
urban flâneur the enjoyment of the modern city was to be found in “the exhilaration, and
display, of promenading to see and be seen” (Lucas, 2004: p4, own emphasis), then the
Street View wanderer is marked by her/his invisibility, possessing a voyeuristic, panoptic
gaze premised precisely on the ability to see and not be seen16.
It is evident that some of the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the cartographic gaze are
reproduced in the gaze of the Street View flâneur. In many ways the street level perspective
acts as a powerful counterpoint to the detached, omniscient gaze from above, representing
not a dehumanised, rationally ordered world, but a landscape that while reduced to a frozen
visual moment, is full of intimate human detail and fleeting events, constructing the
geographical imagination in a manner that produces a more complex sense of place than any
topographic map. However, at the same time, many of the characteristics of the
cartographic gaze are retained in the way that Street View represents space. The viewer
remains ultimately detached and disembodied, exercising a powerful, voyeuristic, one-
directional gaze that while not casting an imperial eye over vast swathes of territory, is now
able to observe with impunity thousands of moments in people’s lives. While the politics of
representation associated with maps, of what is represented, how this is done, and the
subsequent practices of viewing that the map facilitates, have been comprehensively
studied (Harley, 1989; Pickles, 2004), Street View recasts these tensions in a new way. As
such, many have questioned the ethics of allowing a private corporation to lay claim to the
world’s streets in such a way. It is therefore to these issues, of the politics of representation,
visibility and privacy that I turn to in Chapter Five.
16
Except of course in the sense that of being “seen” by Google, as the search terms entered are logged on their servers .
Thanks to Ivan Wu for drawing my attention to this point.
5. Contesting Street View
Google’s mantra is that Street View contains images “no different from what you might see
driving or walking down the street” (Google, 2010d), and as such the collection, compilation,
and dissemination of the millions of photographs that make up this mapping environment is
deemed completely acceptable. Google’s understanding of “the street” thus relies on a
notion of public space where there is a right to act freely within the law, but no expectation
of privacy (Fleischer, 2007a; 2007b)17. However, despite Google’s confidence, following the
initial launch of Street View in the USA, questions were soon raised as to its legality and
ethics, on the grounds that it constituted a gross invasion of privacy of those unwittingly
“mapped” (Kelley, 2008; Lavoie, 2009; Blackman, 2009). Consequently, as Google has
extended Street View across the world, it has adopted a policy whereby visible faces and
license plates are automatically blurred, and a facility is provided for people to request the
removal of images of themselves or their home (Frome et al, 2009; Google, 2010d) (Figure,
5.1.). This stance has generally met with official approval, for example in the UK, where the
Information Commissioner’s Office18 has approved Street View on the grounds that there is
no law against taking photographs in the street, and that blurring is sufficient to de-identify
individuals whose presence on the map is “entirely incidental” (ICO, 2009; Evans, 2009).
However, despite this formal endorsement, in the UK and elsewhere Street View has
continued to generate considerable controversy, as both the media and the public have
questioned the ethics of Google’s latest innovation.
5.1. Maps, surveillance and privacy
Almost all the criticism levelled at Google Street View has been centred on the contention
that, in a number of ways, it constitutes an unacceptable invasion of privacy. It is important
to recognise that the notion of a “right to privacy”, is complex; it is not an immutable or
universal idea, but a social construct that has multiple and contested meanings (Curry, 1998;
Crampton, 2003a; Lyon, 1994). However, in the context of this study, claims to privacy are
perhaps best understood as “political efforts to restrict the ability of others to see or know
specific things”(Haggerty and Ericson, 2006: p10; Iveson, 2009). Thus a binary opposition is
17
Although of course, the ideal of a completely unrestricted public space is something of a myth ( Mitchell, 2003), with
even the right to take photographs subject to restrictions is some cases (Hughes and Taylor, 2009).
18
“The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the
public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals”. See www.ico.gov.uk
Figure 5.1. “Report a concern” on Google Street View *Author’s Screenshots, 20 April 2010]
created between privacy on one hand, and surveillance – “the collection and analysis of
information about populations in order to govern their activities” (Haggerty and Ericson,
2006: p1) – on the other. While the utility of this opposition has been questioned
(Crampton, 2003a), it is still the case that the right to privacy constitutes the “dominant legal
and public discourse against the proliferation of surveillance” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2006:
p8).
The relationship between mapping and surveillance has a long history; as an instrument of
state power maps have been valued for their ability to provide “a picture of where things are
so that there can be a ‘right disposition’ of resources and people over the territory”
(Crampton, 2003b: p138). Given that some have argued that “privacy is dead, killed by a
computer technology that has created a world in which, increasingly, everything is open to
view” (Curry, 1999: p757), the shift towards digital mapping has brought issues of
surveillance and privacy to the fore for cartographers (Monmonier, 2002). Increasingly,
maps are being integrated with a host of “geospatial technologies” such as geographical
information systems, global positioning systems, remote sensing and video surveillance,
leading some to argue that “the age of surveillance, a geospatial-technology-driven
Panopticon, has arrived” (Klinkenberg, 2007: p353).For example, through the manipulation
of personal, geo-coded data, digital mapping systems such as those used in commercial
geodemographics19 are able to create “digital individuals”, which when linked to systems of
remote surveillance means that “one can in principle keep almost constant track of
individuals” (Curry, 1997b: p257). Street View on the other hand can show at most a
person’s image (in most cases blurred) and their location at a particular time. This image is
never live, and does not identify the individual concerned in any way beyond the visual,
lacking even a name connected to a person’s photograph. Thus when placed in a wider
context, at first glance the threat to privacy posed by Street View appear negligible.
However, despite these limitations, Street View has generated a considerable amount of
controversy and media criticism. In the following section, focusing on the UK context, I will
suggest that the manner in which Street View has come to be understood as an “invasion of
privacy” can be best understood by examining how this discourse has intersected with the
process of mapping at three different sites. First, at the site of surveying, where Google’s
methods have been conflated with state surveillance; second, at the site of representation,
where the perspective and detail offered by Street View has raised concerns over
misrepresentation; and third, at the site of viewing practices, where anxieties over who is
casting their gaze on the map have been brought to the fore.
5.2. Survey/Surveillance
The first site of mapping at which discourses of privacy have intersected with Street View
concerns Google’s method of surveying: “the direct collection and production of the spatial
data to be represented” (Cosgrove, 2009: p158). While practices of surveying have
historically entailed a shift away from the body as a recording surface towards the use of
19
Geodemographic systems combine areally coded data with that about individuals and households to create social,
economic and cultural profiles of areas and their residents (see Curry, 1997a).
instrumentation, Street View modifies this process further through its use of vehicle-
mounted cameras to map the world. It is perhaps at the site of the survey that Street View
has encountered the most direct opposition, with the campaign group Privacy
International20 arguing in their formal complaint to the UK government that “the process of
capturing the image per se is unlawful” (Davies, 2009). At a more visceral level, in what has
inevitably been praised by the tabloid press as “a very English revolt” (Hardman, 2009), a
group of residents from the village of Broughton, Buckinghamshire, actively prevented a
Google car from mapping their street, forming a human chain around it in order to block its
passage through the village (Ahmed, 2009; Kennedy, 2009; Pyatt, 2009). For the protestors,
Google’s survey method was unacceptable, as the leader of the protest stated: “My
immediate reaction was anger; how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my
consent” (Paul Jacobs, quoted in Ahmed, 2009)21.
The manner in which media discourse in the UK has depicted Street View goes some way to
explaining this hostile reaction to Google’s survey technique. In many cases, the mapping
practices of Street View have been discursively constructed less as an act of surveying, and
more as a case of covert surveillance. Google has been depicted as an “all-powerful” “cyber
empire” (Hardman, 2009) engaged in a programme of “spying” on the public by sending out
a fleet of “spy cars” equipped with “periscopes” and “all-seeing spy cameras” (Hardman,
2009; Derbyshire and Martin, 2009; Gallagher, et al, 2009). As well as being framed in the
language of covert surveillance, the tabloid press has placed Street View firmly within the
context of an existing “surveillance society” (Gallagher et al, 2009), conflating it with the
excessive extension of “state snooping” (Phibbs, 2009), where there is a perceived desire to
“spy on everything and everyone” (Blackburn, 2009). This elision between Street View and
technologies of state surveillance is reinforced by the manner in which the campaign against
Street View has been taken up by right-wing pressure group Big Brother Watch22, who have
become journalists’ “go-to” source for a quote deploring its dangers (Daily Mail, 2010a;
Telegraph 2010a), despite their stated aim being to campaign against excessive state power
and surveillance (Big Brother Watch, 2010).
20
“Privacy International (PI) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance and privacy
invasions by governments and corporations” (see www.privacyinternational.org)
21
For some, the media furore that followed the protest in Broughton merely served to highlight the paucity of the
argument that Street View constitutes an invasion of privacy, as the village and its residents were soon broadcast around
the world via television and newspaper coverage (see Parsons, 2009; Cellan-Jones, 2009).
22
Big Brother Watch is an offshoot of the Taxpayer’s Alliance, which campaigns for a low-tax society. Alex Deane, director
of Big Brother Watch, has close links to the Conservative Party (see http://www.bigbrotherwatch.org.uk).
Given that the surveillant capacities of Street View appear relatively insignificant when
compared to many geospatial technologies, this conflation with state surveillance appears
somewhat contrived. However, by using cameras mounted above the street as a method of
geographical survey, Street View does bear a close resemblance to the most pervasive
symbol of modern state surveillance, the CCTV camera23 (Bannister and Fyfe, 1998). In their
formal complaint about Street View, Privacy International stress the “substantial
intersection” between it and CCTV, and thus argue that Google’s failure to adhere to the
standards of the CCTV code of practice, in photographing private property and neglecting to
inform the public of its presence, supports their argument that it is illegal (Davies, 2009).
While Google’s mapping practice serves a completely different purpose to CCTV surveillance,
Google’s camera-car shares the CCTV camera’s enigmatic qualities; “it has no eyes but it has
the ‘gaze’” (Koskela, 2000: p259), and as such appears in some cases to provoke similar
emotions to CCTV cameras, where “those being watched may feel guilty for no reason,
embarrassed or uneasy, irritated or angry, or fearful” (p257). Thus rather than indicating any
real surveillant capacity, in the sense of monitoring populations in order to govern them, I
would suggest that the construction of Street View car as a surveillant apparatus stems from
this sense of unease generated from apparently panoptic gaze of Google’s cameras. In a
context where CCTV cameras have become ubiquitous, it is easy to conflate Street View with
this surveillant technology, thus inevitably rendering it an “invasion of privacy”
5.3. Representation/Misrepresentation
Despite this depiction of Google’s surveying method as a means of surveillance, it was only
once the results of this practice were represented online that Street View began to receive
sustained media and public attention. While the photographic detail of Street View may
generate a richer “sense of place” than topographical maps (Parsons, 2008), for others the
visual form of the map is a cause for concern. In media coverage of Street View, much has
been made of the dramatic increase in the level of detail that Street View affords in
comparison to “conventional” maps – “it makes the aerial views of Google Earth look as
antiquated as Christopher Columbus’s map collection” (Gordon, 2009) – with journalists
keen to emphasis the minutiae of what can be seen: “the level of detail is such that your
home can not merely be spotted but a considered opinion given on your choice of curtains”
(Phibbs, 2009). For some, such as the aforementioned protestors of Broughton, this
23
For instance, the symbol of Big Brother Watch is a defaced CCTV camera.
photorealistic perspective is a bridge too far in itself: “they are crossing the line when they
show every detail of our homes” (Paul Jacobs, quoted in Hardman, 2009).
If privacy is understood as the possibility of restricting the exposure of something, then

despite the level of detail that Street View offers, it only represents what is visible from the
street, and thus already exposed to a degree. However, given the inevitable partiality of
Street View, capturing fleeting moments stripped of all but locational context, it does
threaten people’s ability to control how they, or their home, are represented, posing the
possibility of misrepresentation24. Thus it is argued that “if you happen to be doing
something embarrassing during the snapshot where your domestic life is captured, to
remain on the Internet for all to see, well tough luck” (Phibbs, 2009), whilst The Telegraph
suggests that in the face of this “dangerous gizmo”, “the choice is lace curtains – or brighter
lights in the front room for a better impression next time” (2009a, own emphasis). In their
formal complaint against Google, Privacy International reinforce the strength of this fear of
misrepresentation, providing reports of “numerous instances of embarrassment and
distress” (Davies, 2009) resulting from how people have been represented on Street View,
citing for example the case of two heterosexual men photographed such that they appeared
to be kissing.
The issue of misrepresentation arises because in using street-level photography, Street View
has an air of naturalism and a level of detail that other maps do not, placing individuals on
the map, and as such reworking the always present ethical dilemmas of mapping (Harley,
1991). Thus while in the case of the “conventional” topographic map these decisions may
focus on the degree of abstraction and the method of selection to be adopted, the street-
level perspective and photographic realism of Street View means that once the decision has
been taken as to where to map, these considerations are elided. Rather, the possibility of
mapping the world in the world in unprecedented detail, potentially representing everything
visible at a particular time and location, raises a new set of questions. At the same time,
these apparent anxieties about misrepresentation serve to remind us that despite the
heightened sense of realism that Street View offers in comparison to other maps, it remains
a partial representation of the world – at a particular time, from a specific point, and
reduced to a purely visual register in which events are wrenched out of context. Thus Street
24
In the case of Windsor, Canada, the local government claimed that the whole city had been misrepresented by Street
View as the cameras passed through during a refuse collector’s strike. Google has since agreed to re-map the city
(Schmidt, 2010; CBC News, 2010)
View potentially undermines an individual’s ability to control how they are represented to
the world, threatening the control over “exposure” that is fundamental to common
understandings of the right to privacy.
5.4. Use/Abuse
While its unusual visual form may cause certain ethical issues to arise, Street View is only
made meaningful by way of the practices through which it is used and viewed. Thus at this
final site of mapping, of viewing practices, further anxieties have been raised about the
ethics of Street View. While one may revel in the “liberating spatiality” that Street View
affords, it also realises the possibility that “every freak can cruise Britain’s streets from their
armchairs, snooping, studying, imagining unpleasant theories” (Nicoll, 2009). Thus layered
on top of concerns about what can be seen on the Street View map – individuals and homes
(mis)represented in unprecedented detail – and how this information is obtained – using
apparently surveillant technologies – is an anxiety over who is using this technology. As such,
in this context Street View has been interpreted not just through the lens of privacy and
surveillance, but has also been located within existing discourses of fear of the deviant
Other.
Primarily, the tabloid press has been quick to exploit a pervasive fear of crime, with the
assumption made that if affluent homes are rendered visible to the world via Street View,
they will instantly become targets for thieves now able to assess them virtually.
Subsequently Street View has been labelled a “burglar’s charter” (Gallagher et al, 2009), or
“an encyclopaedia for the burgling fraternity” (Hardman, 2009), with an “expert” reformed
criminal suggesting that “this is nothing less than a burglar’s paradise” (Taylor, 2009). While
fear of crime may predominate in “middle England” (Dunhill, 2010; Hardman, 2009), as the
context changes so does the owner of the deviant gaze being cast on Street View. In the
Unionist press in Northern Ireland, fears have been raised that Street View could be used
“for evil purposes” by dissident republicans (Murran, 2010), while following the recent
extension of Street View to cover the whole of the UK, the presence of military bases on the
map has also been seized on by the media and even some politicians as a “serious security
breach”. In “a time of perceived terrorism”, there is a fear that terrorists could be “inspired
by these pictures” (Paul Keetch, MP, quoted in Hough, 2010; Daily Mail, 2010) (Figure 5.2.).
If these fears concern what the ability to view the world through Street View could lead to,
there is also concern over the act of viewing itself. While the innately voyeuristic nature of
the Street View user is often emphasised (Webb, 2009; Telegraph, 2009a), in the wrong
hands (or eyes) it becomes perceived not just an issue of privacy but of “public safety”;
when images of a semi-clothed child were found on Street View, the possibility of the
technology “being exploited for more sinister purposes” by paedophiles was immediately
raised (Merrick, 2009)25.
Figure 5.1. British Special Air Service Base, Credenhill, Herefordshire *Author’s screenshots, 22 March 2010]
These anxieties highlight the manner in which the images that make up Street View’s
mapping environment are able to be imbued with new meanings through practices of
viewing. The fear is that depending on who is using it, Street View can become not just an
aid to navigation or virtual tourism, but a tool for planning crimes, or even a source of
deviant sexual pleasure. Certainly, in combining the naturalism of photography with the
accessibility that the Internet affords, Street View does allow anyone to anonymously view
“realistic” representations of distant places on an unprecedented scale. While the
democratisation of access to mapping offered by the Internet is often praised (Hudson-
Smith et al, 2009), it does not always follow that these newly available resources are used in
a positive manner. However, the over-emphasis placed on the potential for Street View to
be used for “evil purposes” (Murran, 2010) ultimately tells us less about the technology
25
This fear of paedophiles using Street View to search for images of children has also been raised prominently in the USA
(see www.stopinternetpredators.org)
itself, and more about the pervasive discourses of fear that are reproduced in the media;
there has, after all, been no recorded instance of Street View being used to aid crime and
terrorism. To interpret Street View only through this narrow lens is to ignore how Street
View is actually used, and the myriad of practical and imaginative possibilities it presents.
5.5. An Invasion of Privacy?
Given the mutable and contested nature of the concept, any attempt to definitively judge
whether or not Street View constitutes an invasion of privacy would inevitably be
contestable, and as such this chapter has instead sought primarily to understand how and
why Street View has been constructed as such. While it would be erroneous to deny that for
some people Street View does constitute an invasion of privacy – as the protests in
Broughton demonstrated – the effects of the discursive construction of this technology in
the popular, and especially tabloid press, in shaping these responses must be recognised.
Clearly, it is apparent that many of the criticisms levelled at Street View by the media and
campaign groups have been determined more by the structures of pre-existing discourses
that by any close examination of the technology itself, as demonstrated by their
contradictory nature; Street View is hardly effective as an apparatus of the “surveillance
society” if it is also capable of facilitating crime and terrorism. However, underneath the
media scaremongering, there remains something of an anxiety about the “explosion of
space” that Street View affords. In contrast to other maps, the authority of “visual truth”
assumed by a street-level photographic representation of the world raises the somewhat
uncanny spectacle that anyone is able to “see” anywhere from anywhere else, and that we
ourselves might be “seen” on this photographic map. While this possibility may raise new
ethical issues previously beyond the purview of cartography, it also raises some exciting
imaginative possibilities, and it is to these more creative engagements with Street View that
I wish to turn to in Chapter Six.
6. Rethinking Street View
While one may question the legitimacy of the popular media discourses that have become
associated with Google Street View, to restrict analysis of this mapping environment solely
to issues of surveillance and privacy, regardless of on which side of the debate one may fall,
would be to adopt what Kingsbury and Jones have termed an “Apollonian” approach to
cartography, whereby mapping is situated within a “fear-hope dialectic of “either
surveillance or resistance” (2009: p503, own emphasis). That is not to suggest that the
debates about privacy and surveillance are wrong, or unimportant, but that this novel
mapping environment raises other possibilities, and carries other meanings, that extend
beyond this rigid binary determination. Therefore in this chapter, in order to bring into
sharper focus the “partial, open and contingent qualities of the map object” (Cosgrove,
1999: p14) I will examine three artistic projects that have engaged with Street View in
different ways. There is a long history of interaction between art and mapping, and both
artistic and academic interest in this productive tension has exploded in recent years, with
some arguing that technological developments have “rekindled interest in the artistic
dimension of maps” (Caquard et al, 2009: p289; Cosgrove, 2005; 2006; Wood, 2006;
Watson, 2009). However, just as Street View redefines what we conventionally think of as a
map, the artistic interventions that I will consider do not fit easily into any simple definition
of “map art”.
First I will consider the artistic practice of Bill Guffey, whose use of Street View as a tool for
painting the world’s landscapes from the comfort of his own home demonstrates an
imaginative viewing practice that affirms both the prosthetic and aesthetic qualities of this
mapping environment. Second, I will turn to the “Street With a View” project organised by
Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley, which by staging a series of bizarre scenes along one
Pittsburgh street when the Street View car passed by, reinterprets Google’s mapping
practice not as an act of surveillance, but as an opportunity for people to regain control over
their own representation. Finally, I shall consider the more critical engagement with Street
View offered by Montreal-based artist Jon Rafman, whose collections of Street View images
and accompanying essays draw attention to the affective dimensions of this mapping
environment whilst also reflecting on the way in which Street View echoes the alienation of
modern experience.
6.1. Street View as virtual travel
Bill Guffey, a previously unknown artist from Kentucky, USA, has received global exposure as
a result of his use of Google Street View as an artistic resource for landscape painting
(Huessner, 2009; Telegraph, 2009b; Battenbough, 2009). Embracing the “ability to see the
world with endless opportunities” (Guffey, email interview, 2010) that Street View presents,
Guffey has painted over one hundred landscapes of scenes from around the world without
leaving his home studio, many of them collated into geographically themed collections, that
he displays and sells online (see Figure 6.1.).26 As he says: “Street View has changed
everything for me because it means I can go to all of those places I am in love with, sit and
paint them as if I am really there” (Guffey, quoted in Telegraph, 2009b). While some have
critiqued the constraints of the “DigiPlace” offered up by the Google search bar (Zook and
Graham, 2007a; 2007b), for Guffey it provides an entry point into Street View’s “virtually
endless” reference material:
I sometimes use the search function to get myself into areas I’m interested in. If I
want a grungy, more dirty, area of a city I’ll search for tattoo shops or biker bars.
That will usually get me in the general vicinity and I can look around from there.
(Guffey, email interview, 2010)
Through Bill Guffey’s artistic practice, Street View becomes imbued with new meaning, as it
becomes not just a narrowly functional mapping environment, but “a resource for travelling
the world to find interesting locations and subjects to paint” (Guffey, 2010a). Furthermore,
an increasing number of people are engaging in this creative use of Street View through
Guffey’s “Virtual Paintout” project, in which amateur artists are invited to paint from a
particular segment of the map, chosen on a monthly basis, before sharing their work
online27.
In contrast to the fears over deviant viewing practices highlighted in the previous chapter,
Bill Guffey’s artistic practice demonstrates a creative engagement that affirms the prosthetic
qualities of Street View as a means of virtual travel. Indeed, it was this “liberating spatiality”
(della Dora, 2009b: p337) that first attracted Guffey to Street View: “I had liked the idea of
26
See www.bnguffey.com; http://billguffey.blogspot.com.
27
See http://virtualpaintout.blogspot.com;. As reported online, the number of people contributing to the “Virtual
Paintout” is increasing month by month. Bill Guffey also wishes to continue his efforts to promote the use of Street View
by disable artists, as he says “that area has really yet to be touched, and the implications are huge” (Bill Guffey, email
interview, 2010).
Figure 6.1. Bill Guffey’s Street View art websites. [Top] http://billguffey.blogspot.com, showing his Street View State
series; *Bottom+ http://virtualpaintout.blogspot.com *Author’s Screenshots, 12 April 2010].
travelling to cities and countries virtually, and enjoyed “walking” up and down streets
looking at the areas that tourists don’t normally go. I began to find areas, buildings etc. that I
thought would make great paintings” (Guffey, email interview, 2010). Bill Guffey’s artistic
practice thus brings into sharper focus the manner in which Street View extends the
imaginative capacities of the map to combine “the seduction of travel with the security of
staying at home; the attraction of broad horizons without leaving one’s house” (Jacob, 2006:
p76). In some senses this quality demonstrates the continuities between online mapping
environments and older map objects; in its earliest sixteenth century incarnation the atlas
was valued for its ability to “put the world or a place before the viewer without making him
travel” (della Dora, 2009a: p243). However, it is the unique visual form of Street View, its
naturalism and street-level perspective, that lends it the aesthetic qualities to act as a
resource for landscape painting, facilitating this novel interaction between mapping and
artistic practice.
6.2. Street View as self-expression
If Bill Guffey’s work demonstrates a creative viewing practice, then Street with a View can be
seen as an artistic intervention in the process of mapping itself. Staged on Sampsonia Way,
Pittsburgh, on 3rd May 2008, Street with a View was self-styled as the “first ever integration
of art into Google’s Street View mapping platform” (Street with a View, 2008). Co-ordinated
by local artists Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett in conjunction with both members of the local
community and Google itself, the project sought to “create something that blurred the
boundaries between reality and fiction” (Kinsley, quoted in Inscho, 2008) by staging a
number of bizarre and unlikely scenes as the Street View car passed by and photographed
the street. Thus a virtual stroll down Sampsonia Way on Street View reveals a litany of
unexpected sights: a medieval sword fight; a giant chicken; a marching band; even a mad
scientist’s laboratory, and many more besides (Figure 5.2.). As Robin Kinsley explains: “we
were interested in interjecting something staged, something fictional, into Street View and
playing with – and subtly questioning – the notion of reality in something that we perceive
as a factual representation of our world” (quoted in Nephin, 2008). By intervening in the
process of mapping at the site of survey, albeit with Google’s approval and co-operation, the
artists were thus able to both stage a one-off piece of performance art, and create a lasting
and novel piece of “map art” by altering how Sampsonia Way is represented in Street View’s
mapping environment.
Figure 6.2. Scenes from Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, staged as part of the Street with a View project [Author’s
screenshots 9 April 2010].
In its attempt to integrate “fiction, community storytelling and performance art into the
Street View platform” (Street with a View, 2010), the Street with a View project highlights
some of the more ludic qualities of this mapping environment. Just as Kingsbury and Jones
(2009) have argued with respect to the satellite views of Google Earth, Street View is of as
much interest for the bizarre and intoxicating images it throws up as it is for its rational,
practical uses. While in this cases scenes were deliberately staged to catch the attention of
any passing virtual flâneurs, the myriad of unstaged oddities contained within Street View
attract just as much attention, as demonstrated by the multitude of websites devoted to
sharing such images28. However by intervening at the site of survey, Street with a View can
also be read as a challenge to the assumption that Google’s mapping practice threatens
privacy by removing people’s ability to control how they are represented to the world by
instead highlighting the possibilities of “looking back” at the Street View camera. As the
artists explain, part of the aim of the project was to work “together with the local
community to take back the power of representation – defining themselves and their
environments and using technology as a tool of self-expression” (Street with a View, 2008).
Perhaps if Google were to publicise more widely exactly when they would be mapping
certain places, then this potential could be exploited more widely in many imaginative ways.
6.3. Street View as modern experience
While the work of Bill Guffey and the Street with a View project both draw our attention to
the positive and creative uses of Street View, they also eschew any close critical engagement
with the technology, instead focussing on embracing the possibilities it offers. I therefore
wish to turn to the practice of Montreal-based new media artist Jon Rafman, whose practice
offers a deeper and more nuanced reflection on Street View. Inspired by Web 2.0 culture29,
Rafman describes his artistic practice as akin to a flâneur, surfing the Internet with “that
same sort of detached neutral gaze…that you might have found in walking the streets, the
arcades of Paris in the nineteenth century” (Rafman, interview, 2010). In a series of recent
works, he has compiled a number of photographic collections and essays using images taken
directly from Street View, lifted out of the context of this online mapping environment to be
framed as works of art in themselves (Rafman, 2008; 2009a; 2009b; 2009c; 2010)30. Thus
reminiscent of the way in which the act of removing a map from an atlas to frame it for
display is able to “crystallize and magnify its aesthetic qualities” (della Dora, 2009a: p248),
on one level Rafman’s work highlights the affective, rather than representational dimensions
of Street View, as images framed and taken out of context are stripped of their mapping
function, instead standing alone as examples of what he sees as “the logical conclusion of
28
See for example www.googlesightseeing.com; www.streetviewfun.com; www.streetviewfunny.com
29
“Web 2.0” is understood as the shift towards a “participatory web” whereby a large proportion of web users have
become not just consumers, but producers of information (Haklay et al, 2008: p2012).
30
All available at www.googlestreetviews.com
photography”(Rafman, interview, 2010). In curating the multitude of images that Google has
captured, producing collections of photographs that range from the beautiful, to the bizarre
and even unsettling, Rafman seeks to “re-establish the human” within the dehumanised
world produced by the indifferent gaze of the Street View camera (interview, 2010) (Figure
6.3).
However, while Jon Rafman’s work may affirm the aesthetic and affective qualities of Street
View in a similar manner to the artistic practices discussed above, unlike them it also
explicitly invites us to think more critically about Street View itself by placing it in a wider
context. For Rafman, rather than any exaggerated concerns about privacy and
surveillance31, it is the epistemological questions raised by Street View that are of most
interest. He argues that the manner in which this technology represents the world “is a great
manifestation of the present view of reality” (interview, 2010). Inspired by Walter
Benjamin’s interpretation of photography as the medium that reflects the alienation of the
modern subject, Rafman sees Street View as the logical extension of this process; an
automated camera photographing the entire world as “pure data”, where no image is valued
above any other (interview, 2010). Thus Street View is interpreted as a mode of
representation that reflects the modern experience, as Rafman asks in his book 16 Google
Street Views: “Does not Google’s mode of recording the world make manifest how we
already structure our perception? Our own experience often parallels this detached,
indifferent mode of recording with consequent questions about our own significance”
(Rafman, 2010). Rafman’s collections thus seek to demonstrate the alienation of this
“Google-ised” reality” (interview, 2010), highlighting the tension between “an automated
camera and a human who seeks meaning” (Rafman, 2009a).
In the act of curating and “remixing” the images contained within Street View, Jon Rafman’s
artistic practice thus makes the viewer think again about this mapping environment and
imbues it with another new meaning; certainly Google never intended their product to be
read as a meditation on the modern condition. However, in relating Street View to such
fundamental issues as the very experience of modernity and the nature of modern
consciousness, Jon Rafman’s work reiterates the need to consider Street View in both a
broader, and a longer-run historical context than merely that of Internet cartography. Read
in this context, Street View appears not only as the “logical conclusion of photography”, but
31
“I think paranoia about it sometimes is kind of lie a hidden megalomania, what’s so important about your life that
Google’s capturing that you’re so paranoid” (Jon Rafman, interview, 2010)
Figure 6.3. Examples of scenes from Street View used by Jon Rafman. From Rafman, 2009b.
the logical conclusion of the commodification of “cartographic rationality and its

representational logics” (Pickles, 2004: p133) that was apparent in the myriad of visual
technologies that emerged in the nineteenth century. In reducing reality to visual
representations such as the panorama, the arcade, and the world exhibition, these
technologies produced the world as an object for a detached observer; the “world-as-
picture, -as-exhibition; -as-museum, and –as-miniature” (Pickles, 2004: p137; Schwartz,
1996). Thus Street View can be seen as the latest manifestation of the desire to “put the
world in a box” (della Dora, 2007), objectified and commodified for the modern gaze.
6.4. Multiple meanings
In this chapter I have sought to illustrate the instability of meaning and openness to
interpretation that is as inherent to Street View as it is to any map (Cosgrove, 1999).
Through the different artistic practices outlined above, Street View is given meaning beyond
the limiting media discourses that construct it simply in negative terms as an invasion of
privacy: for Bill Guffey it is a prosthetic tool for surrogate travel and artistic inspiration; for
the Street with A View team it is a means of self-expression and playful interaction; and for
Jon Rafman it is a reflection of the tensions of the modern experience. These examples thus
highlight the limitations of the “fear-hope dialectic” (Kingsbury and Jones, 2009) within
which maps are primarily interpreted; to question whether or not Street View constitutes an
invasion of privacy remains important, but there is always an excess of meaning that does
not fit into this binary determination Furthermore, these imaginative engagements with
Street View demonstrate the importance not just of the representational qualities of Street
View, but also of its affective dimensions, that draw us in emotionally and imaginatively
(Craine and Aitken, 2009). However, engaging with these artistic practices does not negate
thinking critically about Street View, but rather, as Jon Rafman’s work shows, can open up
new critical interpretations that go beyond the narrow focus of popular media discourses.
7. Conclusions
As stated in the introduction, in this study I have sought to understand some of the systems
of meaning that coalesce around the online mapping environment of Google Street View,
addressing this digital cartography as a complex and contested element of material culture
in the same way as a traditional map object. First I focused on the mapping environment
itself, arguing that while in adopting a photographic, street-level perspective it is able to
construct a richer sense of place than the abstracted view of a “conventional” map, it also
reproduces a detached and voyeuristic way of seeing akin to that of a virtual flâneur.
Second, I suggested that while the discursive construction of Street View as a dangerous
invasion of privacy may reveal more about existing media discourses of fear than about the
technology itself, the manner in which Street View represents the world in photographic
detail does recast questions about the ability of individuals to control their own
representation on a map. Finally, I highlighted the possibilities for thinking differently about
Street View by considering a number of artistic engagements with this technology that draw
attention to its imaginative and affective dimensions, whilst not necessarily negating a
critical approach.
When read together, these three sections illustrate the impossibility of assigning any
singular of fixed meaning to Street View, and as such I do not wish to definitively endorse
any of the many totalising claims that have been made about Street View by simply
concluding that it is a “dangerous gizmo” or the “next level” of mapping. “Maps, like any
other representations, are open to interpretation; contested and mutable” (Del Casino and
Hanna, 2006: p39), a statement that applies equally to interactive online mapping
environments as it does to “conventional” map objects. As Crampton (2003a) has argued, it
is important not to assign novel technologies with inherent logics, but to trace how they are
constituted through their mutual relations with society. It is through these mutual relations
that Street View is constantly reinterpreted and remade: through media discourses that
have constructed it as a dangerous surveillant technology and shaped public responses to it;
through artistic engagements, which have variously recast Street View as a means of virtual
travel, of creative self-expression, and of reflecting on the modern condition; and through
mundane everyday practices, including my own, where it is as much an imaginative,
prosthetic device as it is a practical tool.
Thus while much of the popular debates about Street View have revolved around the issue
of whether or not it constitutes an invasion of privacy (and continue to do so, as a recent
letter of complaint from the data protection authorities of ten countries demonstrates
[Stoddart et al, 2010]), it is not sufficient to think about Street View only in these binary – or
to use Kingsbury and Jones’ language, Apollonian – terms. That is not to suggest however,
that these issues should be ignored or dismissed. While the manner in which Street View has
been represented in certain sections of the media has at times bordered on histrionic
scaremongering, it cannot simply be argued that these discourses are “wrong”. Privacy itself
is a social construct, and it is clear that through the effects of these and prior discourses,
Street View is held to be an affront to privacy by some people. While it may be the case that
as the initial novelty of the technology wears off privacy will become less of an issue, it
seems that these concerns will continue to be raised by both the media and members of the
public for the foreseeable future32.
Certainly, there is a need to remain somewhat sceptical about Street View. As others have
pointed out, the de facto digital globe of Google Maps, Google Earth, and now Street View,
is controlled by a for-profit private entity with worryingly monopolistic tendencies, that has
accumulated an unprecedented degree of control over the flow of information through the
Internet33 (Zook and Graham, 2007a; Crampton, 2010). Ultimately, Google has created
Street View with the aim of making money. However, to write Street View off simply as an
invasion of privacy, or an act of commodification by “amoral” corporate “menace” (Porter,
2009), would be to deny the excess of meaning that is always present, that I have tried to
draw attention to in this study by examining both my own use of Street View and the various
artistic engagements that it has inspired. According to Craine and Aitken (2009: p152)
“maps, are at base, representations, and yet it is not an overstatement to suggest that when
they represent space well they also draw us in imaginatively and emotionally”. Thus these
imaginative, affective dimensions of Street View, that allow it to be performed as a
prosthetic means of virtual travel, or a stimulus for creative activity, are just as important as
any concerns as to its “dangerous” or “surveillant” capacities.
32
As I write, Google has just begun surveying the Isle of Man for Street View, and inevitably complaints are already being
made to the Manx government on the grounds of privacy invasion (BBC, 2010).
33
Google has been criticised repeatedly with regard to issues of data privacy and online surveillance (see e.g. Porter,
2009).
7.1. A world-as-picture
Much of the emphasis of this study, and other work that has engaged with the recent
proliferation of online mapping technologies, has been placed on the novelty of these digital
cartographies; the “epistemic break” (Crampton, 2003a) that they have arguably heralded.
However, I would caution against overstating the extent to which Street View and similar
technologies constitute a “break” from older technologies for the visual representation of
space. Jon Rafman’s interpretation of Street View as a reflection of modern experience
invites us to place this novel visual technology in a broader and more long-run historical
context. If the epistemological privileging of vision and sight, an understanding of the
“world-as-picture, -as-exhibition, -as-museum, and-as-miniature” (Pickles, 2004: p137), is
central to the social imaginary of modernity, then surely Street View can be placed within
the long lineage of visual technologies, from panoramas through photographic slideshows,
to world exhibitions, that have as their goal the “rendering up of the world as a thing to be
viewed”; as an “object on display” (Mitchell, 1989, p220-221). If advanced GIS and
computerised “virtual reality” offer a “radicalized vision of modernity” which “at once set
the world at a distance – accessed from a platform, seen through a window, displayed on a
screen – and yet also promise to place the spectator in motion inside the spectacle”
(Gregory, 1994: p66), then is Street View not simply the latest incarnation of this vision?
In combining the exemplary modern visual technology of photography, long valued for its
assumed verisimilitude and objectivity, and its ability to dislocate space and time (Schwartz
1996, Wells, 2004), with the liberating dimensionality of the map, freeing the viewer from
the “confining perspective” of the photographic image (Cosgrove, 1999: p2), Street View
works perhaps more effectively than any visual technology before it in conquering space and
acting as a “surrogate for travel” (Schwartz, 1996: p31). While mapping the world from
street level may not reproduce the omniscient totalizing, yet also transcendent cartographic
gaze in its entirety, Street View will never be a transparent window on the world, but as this
study has shown, offers its own partial, contested, but detached way of seeing. Perhaps
then, to employ another oft-employed symbol of the modern experience, the notion of a
“virtual flâneur” does offer an appropriate metaphor for the gaze of the Street View user: a
fundamentally ambiguous wanderer of the streets (Frisby, 1994; Gluck, 2003); caught
between immersion and detachment; oscillating between an objective, rational “detective”
(Frisby, 1994) and the “idler” seeking sensation and aesthetic pleasure (Featherstone, 1998);
potentially voyeuristic, and ultimately complicit in the “empire of the gaze” (Tester, 1994:
p18).
7.2. Where next?
Inevitably this study contains a number of omissions and uncertainties. First, I make no
claims that the interpretations I have presented here correspond to a “true” or objective
account of Street View and the web of meaning surrounding it; indeed, this study itself adds
another layer of contested discourse to the mutual relations between this mapping
environment and its societal context. While the inevitably subjective nature of this study
does not compromise its validity – all knowledge is partial and situated – it is worth
reflecting upon the impact of my positionality on my findings. Importantly, as a twenty-one
year old living in the affluent West, using the Internet and its associated technologies is a
part of my everyday life, and it is inevitable that this familiarity has shaped my interpretation
of Street View in a particular way. Second, undoubtedly this study could be improved. In
particular, I was disappointed not to be able to carry out a more extensive range of
interviews, particularly with those more critical of Street View, as this would have enabled
me to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the basis for their opposition, which could
have served as a counterpoint to the inevitably overstated discourses circulating within the
popular press.
While the exploratory nature of this study hints towards numerous avenues for further
research, here I want to highlight just three. First, when considering the issues that have
arisen around Street View concerning privacy, I deliberately restricted my focus to the UK.
However, one of the striking points about this mapping environment is the considerable
geographical differences in the extent to which Street View has been opposed on the
grounds of privacy around the world, from general acceptance in North America to a
complete ban in Greece (Smith, 2009). A comparative project could investigate the reasons
behind these geographies of privacy, and trace why they have led Street View to provoke
such contrasting reactions. Second, in focusing primarily on Street View itself as an element
of material culture, and on the social and cultural meanings attributed to it, I have elided any
serious consideration of the political economy of Street View. As Dodge et al (2009: p230)
argue, little attention is generally paid to the “monetary and political structures underlying
the production of maps” (p230), yet given the increasing dominance of private corporations
such as Google in the sphere of online mapping, this lacuna clearly needs addressing; why is
it that companies such as Google see so much opportunity for profit in cartography? Finally,
whereas this study has been necessarily small scale, a valuable further project would be to
attempt a more extensive approach, to get beneath the media discourses and investigate
what the public actually thinks of Street View, and if and how people are using it on a daily
basis.
While these and many other topics may offer pertinent foci for further research into Street
View and similar technologies, perhaps the most pressing challenge for geographers and
others seeking to interpret these new ways of representing the world is simply keeping up
with the latest developments. Even as I write, Street View is undergoing some subtle
transformations that make fears that “the universalizing mantra of digital information and
mapping” merely constitutes “a new set of global exhibitions for the dissemination of
information and goods” (Pickles, 20004: p13) seem ever more prescient. As of April 2010,
Google has begun to integrate its directory of local businesses into Street View, placing
hyperlinked icons within the mapping environment at the corresponding location (Lafon,
2010), and it has recently been reported that software has been patented to enable the
insertion of real-time adverts over the top of photographed billboards (Barnett, 2010). In the
longer term, undoubtedly the desire to visually represent the world around us will continue
to manifest itself in new ways as technology develops. Some have suggested that we might
soon see a “Second Earth”, a fully three-dimensional, “social” representation of the world,
populated by our own personal avatars, exploring and interacting in virtual space (Hudson-
Smith et al, 2009a). As Street View expands and develops, perhaps in the near future David
Gelernter’s dream of a complete “mirror world” will truly come to fruition:
You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world – the
town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital –
will hang there in a sharp colour image, abstract but recognisable, moving subtly in
a thousand places. (Gelernter, 1992: p1).
8. Bibliography
Aday, S. and Livingston, S. (2009) NGOs as intelligence agencies: The empowerment of

transnational advocacy networks and the media by commercial remote sensing in
the case of the Iranian nuclear program, Geoforum, 40, pp514-522.
Ahmed, M. (2009) Village mob thwarts Google Street View car, The Times, 3rd April [Online]
Available at:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6022902.ece
[Accessed 3 March 2010].
Arnold, D. (2009) Panoptic Visions of London: Possessing the Metropolis, Art History, 32 (2),
pp332-350.
Ash, J. (2009) Emerging spatialities of the screen: video games and the reconfiguration of
spatial awareness, Environment and Planning A, 41, pp2105-2124.
Ash, J., Romanillos, J. L. and Trigg, M. (2009) Videogames, visuality and screens:
reconstructing the Amazon in physical geographical knowledge, Area, 41 (4), pp464-
474.
Barnett, E. (2010) Google Street View ‘to carry real time ads’, The Telegraph, 12 January
[Online]. Available at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6974066/Google-Street-View-to-
carry-real-time-ads.html [Accessed 27 April 2010].
Battenbough, G. (2009) A brush with Google Street View, Architecture and Design [Online]
Available at: http://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/article/A-brush-with-
Google-Street-View/497980.aspx [Accessed 15 March 2010].
BBC (2010) Manx residents contact Government over Google cameras [Online]. Available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/isle_of_man/8648626.stm [Accessed 29
April 2010].
Big Brother Watch (2010) Mission Statement [Online]. Available at:

http://bigbrotherwatch.typepad.com/home/mission-statement.html [Accessed 21
March 2010].
Blackburn, T. (2009) Just what we needed Google, more cameras, The Sun, 11th April
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/columnists/article2371994.ece
Blackman, J. (2009) Omniveillance, Google, Privacy in Public, and the Right to your Digital
Identity: A Tort for recording and disseminating an individual’s image over the
Internet, Santa Clara Law Review, 49, pp313-392.
Blomley, N. (2003) Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey,
and the Grid, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93 (1), pp121-141.
Caquard, S., Piatti, B. and Cartwright, W. (2009) Editorial: Special Issue on Art & Cartography,
The Cartographic Journal, 46 (4), pp289-291.
Cartwright, W. (2008) Re-visiting the Use of Surrogate Walks for Exploring Local Geographies
Using Non-immersive Multimedia, in M. Dodge, M. McDerby and M. Turner, eds.,
Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and Applications. London: Wiley, pp109-
140.
CBC News (2010) Google Street View to expand in Canada, 22 March [Online] Available at:
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/03/22/google-street-view-windsor-
canada.html [Accessed 22 March 2010].
Cellan-Jones, R. (2009) The Battle of Broughton, [Online] Available at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/04/the_battle_of_broughton_1.html
de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. S. Rendall, Berkely: University of
California Press.
Clarke, D. B. and Doel, M. A. (2005) Engineering space and time: moving pictures and
motionless trips, Journal of Historical Geography, 31, pp41-60.
Cosgrove, D. (1985) Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10 (1), pp45-62.
Cosgrove, D. (1994) Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo
Space Photographs, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 84 (2),
pp270-294.
Cosgrove, D. (1998 [1985]) Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, 2nd edition.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Cosgrove, D. (1999) Introduction: Mapping Meaning, in D. Cosgrove, ed., Mappings. London:

Reaktion Books, pp1-23.
Cosgrove, D. (2001) Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western
Imagination. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Cosgrove, D. (2005) Maps, Mapping, Modernity: Art and Cartography in the Twentieth
Century, Imago Mundi, 57 (1), pp35-54.
Cosgrove, D. (2006) Art and Mapping: An Introduction, Cartographic Perspectives, 53, p4
Cosgrove, D. (2008) Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World.
London: IB Tauris.
Crampton, J. W. (2003a) The Political Mapping of Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.
Crampton, J. W. (2003b) Cartographic Rationality and the Politics of Geosurveillance and

Security, Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 30 (2), pp135-148.
Crampton, J. W. (2009) Cartography: maps 2.0, Progress in Human Geography, 33 (1), pp91-
100.
Crampton, J. W. (2010) Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS. Chichester:

Wiley- Blackwell.
Crampton. J. W. and Krygier, J. (2006) An Introduction to Critical Cartography, ACME: An

International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4 (1), pp11-33.
Crane, J. and Aitken, S. C. (2009) The emotional life of maps and other visual geographies, in
M. Dodge, R. Kitchin and C. Perkins, eds., Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in
Cartographic Theory. London: Routledge, pp149-166.
Cross, M. (2010) Defending the public space, Guardian Online, 26 April [Online] Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/apr/26/google-
street-view-privacy [Accessed 5 March 2010].
Curry, M. R. (1997a) The Digital Individual and the Private Realm, Annals of the Association
of American Geographers, 87 (4), pp681-699.
Curry, M. R. (1997b) Digital People, Digital Places: Rethinking Privacy in a World of

Geographic Information, Ethics and Behaviour, 7 (3), pp253-263.
Curry, M. R. (1998) Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Systems. New York:
Routledge.
Curry, M. R. (1999) Rethinking privacy in a geocoded world, in P. A. Longley, M. F. Goodchild,

D. J. Maguire, D. W. Rhind, eds., Geographical Information Systems, Volume 2,
Management Issues and Applications. New York: Wiley, pp757-767.
Daily Mail (2009) Vincent Van Google: Artist uses Street View website to travel the world
virtually, Mail Online [Online]. Available at :
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212494/Vincent-Van-Google-Artist-uses-
Street-View-website-travel-world-virtually.html [Accessed 15 March 2010].
Daily Mail (2010a) Ashleigh Hall captured on Google Street View just weeks before she was
killed by facebook predator, Mail Online, 17 March 2010 [Online]. Available at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1258578/Ashleigh-Hall-captured-Google-
View-just-weeks-murdered-Facebook-predator-Peter-Chapman.html [Accessed 23
March 2010].
Daily Mail (2010b) Fury as Google puts the SAS's secret base on Street View in 'very serious
security breach', Mail Online [Online]. Available at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259162/Google-Street-View-shows-
secret-SAS-base-major-security-breach.html#ixzz0iv6BJ4Lw [Accessed 22 March
2010].
Davies, S. (2009) Complaint: Google Street View technology [Online]. Available at:
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-564039
Del Casino Jr., V. J. and Hanna, S. P. (2006) Beyond the 'Binaries': A Methodological
Intervention for Interrogating Maps as Representational Practices, ACME: An
International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4 (1), pp34-56.
Della Dora, V. (2007) Putting the world into a box: A geography of nineteenth-century
‘travelling landscapes’, Geografiska Annaler B, 89 (4), pp287-306.
della Dora, V. (2009a) Performative Atlases: Memory, Materiality, and (Co-)Authorship,

Cartographica, 44 (4), pp241-256.
della Dora, V. (2009b) Travelling landscape objects, Progress in Human Geography, 33,
pp334-354
Derbyshire, D. and Martin, A. (2008) Google ‘burglar’s charter’ street cameras given the all
clear by privacy watchdog, Mail Online, 31st July [Online] Available at:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1031861/Google-burglars-charter-
street-cameras-given-clear-privacy-watchdog.html [Accessed 4 March 2010].
Dodge, M. and Perkins, C. (2008) Reclaiming the map: British geography and ambivalent
cartographic practice, Environment and Planning A, 40 (6), pp1271-1276.
Dodge, M. and Perkins, C. (2009) The 'view from nowhere'? Spatial politics and cultural
significance of high-resolution satellite imagery, Geoforum, 40, p497-501.
Dodge, M., Perkins, C. and Kitchin, R. (2009) Mapping modes, methods and moments: A
manifesto for map studies, in M. Dodge, R. Kitchin and C. Perkins, eds., Rethinking
Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. London: Routledge, pp220-243.
Driver, F. (2003) On Geography as a Visual Discipline, Antipode, 35 (2), pp227-231.
Dunhill, L. (2010) Bradenham residents: ‘Google programme will help burglar’s’, Bucks Free
Press, 26th January [Online] Available at:
http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/4872329.Residents___Google_programme_
will_help_burglars_/?ref=rss [Accessed 7 March 2010].
Dunn, K. (2005) Interviewing, in I. Hay, ed., Qualitative Research Methods in Human

Geography, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp79-105.
Edney, M. (1993) Cartography without “Progress”: Reinterpreting the Nature and Historical
Development of Mapmaking, Cartographica, 30 (2/3), pp54-68.
Edney, M. (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-
1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Edney, M. (2009) The Irony of Imperial Mapping, in J. R. Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map:
Cartography and the Mastery of Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp11-
46.
Evans, D. (2009) Re: Google Streetview Complaint [Online] Available at:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/notices/respons
e_to_pi_complaint_v1.pdf [Accessed 5 March 2010]
Featherstone, M. (1998) The Flâneur, the City and Virtual Public Life, Urban Studies, 35, 5-6,
pp909-925.
Fleischer, P. (2007a) Can you “identify” the person walking down the street [Online]
Available at: http://peterfleischer.blogspot.com/2007/10/can-you-identify-person-
walking-down.html [Accessed 5 March 2010].
Flesicher, P. (2007b) Street View and Privacy [Online] Available at: http://google-
latlong.blogspot.com/2007/09/street-view-and-privacy.html [Accessed 5 March
2010].
Frisby, D. (1994) The flâneur in social theory, in K. Tester, ed., The Flâneur. London:
Routledge, pp81-110.
Frome, A., Cheung, G., Abdulkader, A., Zennaro, M., Wu, B., Bissacco, A., Adam, H., Neven,
H. and Vincent, L. (2009) Large Scale Privacy Protection in Google Street View
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.goo
gle.com/en//archive/papers/cbprivacy_iccv09.pdf [Accessed 3 May 2010].
Fyfe, N. R. and Bannister, J. (1998) ‘The Eyes Upon the Street’: Closed-circuit television
surveillance and the city, in. N. R. Fyfe, ed., Images of the Street: Planning, identity
and control in public space, London: Routledge, pp254-267.
Gallagher, I., Harper, T., and Delgado, M. (2009) You’re not Googling us: The Blairs, House of
Commons and Google boss won’t have THEIR privacy invaded on Street View, Mail
Online, 22nd March [Online] Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
1163778/Youre-Googling-The-Blairs-House-Commons-Google-boss-wont-THEIR-
privacy-invaded-Street-View.html [Accessed 4 March 2010].
Gelernter, D. (1992) Mirror Worlds: Or the day software puts the universe in a shoebox. How
it will happen and what it will mean. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gluck, M. (2003) The Flâneur and the Aesthetic: Appropriation of Urban Culture in Mid-
Nineteenth Century Paris, Theory, Culture & Society, 20 (5), pp53-80.
Goodchild, M. F. (2008) What does Google Earth mean for the Social Sciences, in M. Dodge,
M. McDerby and M. Turner, eds., Geographic Visualization: Concepts, Tools and
Applications. London: Wiley, pp11-23.
Google (2010a) Google Street View imagery set to go nationwide [Online]. Available at:
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/press/pressrel/20100310_streetview.html
Google (2010b) Corporate Information: Quick Profile [Online] Available at

http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/facts.html [Accessed 11 February 2010].
Google (2010c) Using Street View [Online] Available at:

http://www.google.co.uk/help/maps/streetview/using-street-view.html [Accessed
17 February 2010].
Google (2010d) Privacy [Online] Available at:

http://www.google.co.uk/help/maps/streetview/privacy.html [Accessed 5 March
2010]
Gordon, B. (2009) Who allows Google to put my big knickers online? Telegraph [Online]
Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/bryonygordo
n/5024537/Who-allowed-Google-to-put-my-big-knickers-online.html [Accessed 6
March 2010].
Graham, M. (forthcoming) Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place: Web 2.0 and the
Construction of a Virtual Earth, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie
Gregory, D. (1994) Geographical Imaginations. Cambrige, MA: Blackwell.
Gregory, D. (2004) The Colonial Present. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Guffey, B. (2010a) The Virtual Paintout [Online]. Available at:

http://virtualpaintout.blogspot.com [Accessed 15 March 2010].
Guffey, B. (2010b) Biography, Bill Guffey – Kentucky Artist [Online]. Available at:
http://www.bnguffey.com/mbr_bio.php. [Accessed 15 March 2010].
Haggerty, K. D. and Ericson, R. V. (2006) The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, in K.
D. Haggerty and R. V. Ericson, eds., The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp1-25.
Haklay, M., Singleton. A. and Parker, C. (2008) Web Mapping 2.0: The Neogeography of the
Geoweb, Geography Compass, 2 (6), pp2011-2039.
Hardman, R. (2009) A very English revolt sees off Google’s spies, Mail Online, 6th April
[Online] Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1167211/ROBERT-
HARDMAN-A-English-revolt-sees-Googles-spies.html [Accessed 3 March 2010].
Harley, J. B. (1988) Maps, knowledge, and power, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, eds., The
Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp277-312.
Harley, J. B. (1989) Deconstructing the Map, Cartographica, 26 (2), pp1-20.
Harley, J. B. (1991 [2001]) Can there be a Cartographic Ethics? in P. Laxton, ed., The New
Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, pp198-207.
Harley, J. B. (1992) Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 82 (3), pp522-542.
Harris, C. (2006) The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery, “Battlespace Awareness”, and the
Structures of the Imperial Gaze, Surveillance & Society, 41 (1/2), pp101-122.
Harris, L. and Hazen, H. (2009) Rethinking maps from a more-than-human perspective:

nature-society, mapping and conservation territories, in M. Dodge, R. Kitchin and C.
Perkins, eds., Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. London:
Routledge: pp50-67.
Harvey, M. (2009) Greece bans Google Street View, Times Online, 13 May [Online]. Available
at:
[Accessed 29 April 2010].
Heussner, K. M. (2009) Google Puts the World at the tip of Painter’s Brush, ABC News,
http://abcnews.go.com//technology/story?id=8295043&page=1 [Accessed 15
March 2010].
Hough, A. (2010) Google Street View criticised for ‘showing images of secret SAS
headquarters’, The Telegraph Online [Online] Available at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7479690/Google-Street-View-
criticised-for-showing-images-of-secret-SAS-headquarters.html [Accessed 22 March
2010].
Hudson-Smith, A., Batty, M., Crooks, A. and Milton, R. (2009a) Mapping for the Masses:
Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing, Social Science Computer Review, 27 (4),
pp524-538.
Hudson-Smith, A., Crooks, A., Gibin, M., Milton, R. and Batty, M. (2009b) Neogeography and
Web 2.0: concepts, tools and applications, Journal of Location Based Services, 3 (2),
pp118-145.
Hughes, M. and Taylor, J. (2009) Warning: Do not take this picture, The Independent, 3rd
December [Online] Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-
news/warning-do-not-take-this-picture-1833127.html [Accessed 5 March 2010].
Information Commissioner’s Office (2009) Common sense on Street View must prevail, says
the ICO, Press Release [Online] Available at:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/pressreleases/2009/google_streetview_
220409_v2.pdf [Accessed 5 March 2010].
Information Commisioner’s Office (2010) Information Commissioner’s Office [Online]

Available at: http://www.ico.gov.uk/ [Accessed 5 March 2010].
Inscho, J. (2008) The Making of “Street with a View” [Video; Online] Available at:
http://www.streetwithaview.com/video.html [Accessed 9 April 2010].
Introna, L. D. and Ilharco, F. M. (2006) On the Meaning of Screens: Towards a

Phenomenological Account of Screenness, Human Studies, 29, pp57-76.
Iveson, K. (2009) Too public or too private: The politics of privacy in the real-time city, paper
presented at Engaging Data: First International Forum on the Application and
Management of Personal Electronic Information [Online]. Available at:
http://senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata/papers/ED_SII_Too_Public_or_Too_Private.
pdf [Accessed 7 March 2010].
Jacob, C. (2006 [1992]) The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography

throughout History, trans. T. Conley, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
James, N. and Busher, H. (2006) Credibility, authenticity and voice: dilemmas in online
interviewing, Qualitative Research, 6 (3), pp403-420.
Jordan, B. (2009) Introduction: Blurring Boundaries: The “Real” and the “Virtual” in Hybrid
Spaces, Human Organization, 68 (2), pp181-193.
Kelley, J. D. (2008) A Computer with a View: Progress, Privacy, and Google, Brooklyn Law
Review, 74 (1), pp187-230.
Kennedy, M. (2009) Coy village tells Google Street View ‘spy’ to beat a retreat, The Guardian,
3rd April [Online] Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/03/google-street-view-broughton
Kingsbury, P. and Jones III, J. P. (2009) Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian Adventures on Google
Earth, Geoforum, pp502-513.
Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2007) Rethinking Maps, Progress in Human Geography, 31 (3),
pp331-344.
Kitchin, R., Perkins, C. and Dodge, M. (2009) Thinking about maps, in M. Dodge, R. Kitchin
and C. Perkins, eds., Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory.
London: Routledge, pp1-25.
Kivits, J. (2005) Online Interviewing and the Research Relationship, in C. Hine, ed., Virtual
Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet, Oxford: Berg, pp35-49.
Klinkenberg, B. (2007) Geospatial technologies and the Geographies of Hope and Fear,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97 (2), pp350-360.
Koskela, H. (2000) ‘The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of
urban space, Progress in Human Geography, 24 (2), pp243-265.
Lafon, S. (2010) Browse local businesses in Street View, Google Lat Long Blog, 26 April
[Online]. Available at: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/04/browse-local-
businesses-in-street-view.html [Accessed 27 April 2010].
Latham, A. and McCormack, D. (2009) Thinking with images in non-representational cities:

vignettes from Berlin, Area, 41 (3), pp252-262.
Lavoie, A. (2009) The Online Zoom Lens: Why Internet Street-Level Mapping Technologies
demand reconsideration of the Modern-Day Tort Notion of “Public Privacy”, Georgia
Law Review, 43 (2), pp575-616.
Lippmann, A. (1980) Movie Maps: An Application of the Optical Video-disc to Computer

Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 14 (3), pp32-42.
Lorimer, H. (2005) Cultural geography: The busyness of being 'more-than-representational',

Progress in Human Geography, 29 (1), pp83-94.
Lucas, R. (2004) Inscribing the city: a flâneur in Tokyo, Anthropology Matters, 6 (1), pp1-11.
Lyon, D. (1994) The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Martins, L. (1999) Mapping Tropical Waters, in D. Cosgrove, ed., Mappings. London:

Reaktion Books, pp148-168.
Merrick, J. (2009) Google Street View forced to remove images, The Independent, 22nd
March [Online]. Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/google-street-view-forced-to-remove-images-1651311.html [Accessed 7
March 2010].
Miller, C. C. (2006) A Beast in the Field: The Google Maps Mashup as GIS/2, Cartographica,
41 (3), pp187-199.
Mitchell, D. (2003) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New
York: Guilford Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1989) The World as Exhibition, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
31 (2), pp217-236.
Monmonier, M. (2002) Spying with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of
Privacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Monmonier, M. (2007) Cartography: the multidisciplinary pluralism of cartographic art,

geospatial technology, and empirical scholarship, Progress in Human Geography, 31
(3), pp371-379.
Mullan, K. (2010) Fears Google Street View could be used to plan attacks, Londonderry
Sentinel, 28th January [Online]. Available at:
http://www.londonderrysentinel.co.uk/news/Fears-Google-Street-View-
could.6023153.jp [Accessed 7 March 2010].
Nephin, D. (2008) Artists stage scenes to lurk in Google maps: Pittsburgh Street View map
shows medieval swordfight, building escape, Associated Press, 12 November
[Online]. Available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27682412 [Accessed 9 April
2010].
Nicoll, R. (2009) Honestly, Google, I was only out to lunch, The Observer, 22 March [Online].
Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/22/google-
street-view [Accessed 8 March 2010].
O’Connor, H., Madge, C., Shaw, R., and Wellens, J. (2008) Internet-based Interviewing, in N.
Fielding, R. M. Lee and G. Blank, eds., The Sage Handbook of Online Research
Methods. London: Sage, pp271-289.
Parks, L. (2009) Digging into Google Earth: An analysis of “Crisis in Darfur”, Geoforum, 40,
pp533-545.
Parsons, E. (2008) Can you tell where it is yet… [Online]. Available at:
http://www.edparsons.com/2008/04/can-you-tell-where-it-is-yet/ [Accessed 24
February 2010].
Parsons, E. (2009) If you want privacy, don’t invite the BBC! [Online] Available at
http://www.edparsons.com/2009/04/if-you-want-privacy-dont-invite-the-bbc/
Perkins, C. and Dodge, M. (2009) Satellite imagery and the spectacle of secret spaces,
Geoforum, 40, p546-560.
Phibbs, H. (2009) Why I want Google to keep its damned nose out of my home, Mail Online,
19th March [Online] Available at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-
1163180/HARRY-PHIBBS-Why-I-want-Google-damned-nose-home.html [Accessed 4th
March 2010].
Pickles, J. (2000) Cartography, Digital Transitions, and Questions of History, Cartographic

Perspectives, 37, pp4-18.
Pickles, J. (2004) A History of Spaces: Cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded
world. London: Routledge.
Pinder, D. (2003) Mapping worlds: Cartography and the politics of representation, in A.

Blunt, P. Gruffudd, J. May, M. Ogborn and D. Pinder, eds., Cultural Geography in
Practice, pp172-190.
Plewe, B. (2007) Web Cartography in the United States, Cartography and Geographic
Information Science, 34 (2), pp133-136.
Porter, H. (2009) Google is just an amoral menace, The Observer, 5 April [Online]. Available
at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/05/google-internet-piracy
[Accessed 26 April 2010].
Pyatt, J. (2009) Google revolt, The Sun, 3rd April [Online] Accessible at
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2357834.ece [Accessed 3rd
March 2010].
Rafman, J. (2008) A Collection of Google Street Views [Online]. Available at:

www.googlestreetviews.com [Accessed 10 April 2010].
Rafman, J. (2009a) The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, Art Fag City, 12 August 2009
[Online] Available at http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-
eyes-of-google-street-view/ [Accessed 10 April 2010].
Rafman, J. (2009b) A Collection of Google Street Views: Volume 2 [Online]. Available at:
Rafman, J. (2009c) A Collection of Google Street Views: Volume 3 [Online]. Available at:
Rafman, J. (2010) Sixteen Google Street Views. Chicago: Golden Age.

Rose, G. (1997) Situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics, Progress in
Human Geography, 21(3), pp305-312.
Rose, G. (2003) On the Need to Ask How, Exactly, Is Geography “Visual”?, Antipode, 35 (2),
pp212-221.
Schmidt, D. (2010) City seeks Google reshoot, The Windsor Star, 23 February [Online].
Available at:
http://www.windsorstar.com/technology/City+seeks+Google+reshoot/2599784/stor
y.html [Accessed 23 February 2010].
Schwartz, J. M. (1996) The Geography Lesson: photographs and the construction of

imaginative geographies, Journal of Historical Geography, 22 (1), pp16-45.
Schwartz, J. M. and Ryan, J. R., Introduction: Photography and the Geographical Imagination,
in J. M. Schwartz and J. R Ryan, eds., (2003) Picturing Place: Photography and the
Geographical Imagination: London: IB Tauris, pp1-18.
Smith, H. (2009) Google Street View banned from Greece, Guardian Online, 12 May [Online].
Accessible at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/12/google-street-
view-banned-greece [Accessed 5 March 2010].
Stoddart, J., Türk, A., Schaar, P., Hawkes, B., Hacohen, Y., Pizzetti, F., Kohnstamm, J., Shroff,
M., Lombarte, A. R., and Graham, C. (2010) Letter to Google Inc. Chief Executive
Officer, 19 April [Online]. Available at: http://www.priv.gc.ca/media/nr-
c/2010/let_100420_e.cfm [Accessed 26 April 2010].
Street With a View (2008) Street With a View Project brings real Public Art to the Virtual
Streets – In Google Maps Street View [Online]. Available at:
http://www.streetwithaview.com/SWAV_press_release.pdf [Accessed 8 April 2010].
Sturges, J. E. and Hanrahan, K. J. (2004) Company telephone and face-to-face qualitative

interviewing: a research note, Qualitative Research, 4 (1), pp107-118.
Taylor, R. (2008) Google view is good for thieves, The Sun, 12 July, [Online]. Available at:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/1414121/Burglars-can-use-new-
Google-Street-View-project-to-their-advantage.html [Accessed 7 March 2010].
Telegraph View (2009a) Google Street View: a dangerous gizmo, The Telegraph [Online].
Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-
view/5018678/Google-Street-View-a-dangerous-gizmo.html [Accessed 22 March
2010].
The Telegraph (2009b) Artist paints landscapes from Google Street View, The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6161661/Artist-paints-landscapes-
from-Google-Street-View.html [Accessed 15 March 2010].
The Telegraph (2010) Google Street View goes nationwide in Britain, The Telegraph, 11
March [Online]. Available at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7418821/Google-Street-View-goes-
nationwide-in-Britain.html [Accessed 23 March 2010].
Tester, K. (1994) Introduction, in K. Tester, ed., The Flâneur, London: Routledge, pp1-21.
Times Online (2010) SAS base images to stay on Google Street View, Times Online, 20 March,
[Online] Available at:
[Accessed 22 March 2010).
Tonkiss, F. (2004) Analysing text and speech: content and discourse analysis, in C. Seale, ed.,
Researching Society and Culture, 2nd edition. London: Sage, pp367-381.
Waitt, G. (2005) Doing Discourse Analysis, in I. Hay, ed., Qualitative Research Methods in
Human Geography, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp163-191.
Warman, M. (2010) Google Streetview to cover every UK road, The Telegraph, 9 March
[Online] Available at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7407222/Google-Streetview-to-
cover-every-UK-road.html [Accessed 9 March 2010].
Watson, R. (2009) Mapping and Contemporary Art, The Cartographic Journal, 46 (4), pp289-
291.
Webb, S. (2009) Can Google Street View stay ahead of the privacy lawyers? Times Online,
April 2 [Online] Available at:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6015087.ece [Accessed 1
March 2010].
Williams, M. (2007) Avatar watching: participant observation in graphical online

environments, Qualitative Research, 7 (1), pp73-85.
Williams, M. (2010) Behind the Scenes [Online] Available at:

http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/help/maps/streetview/behind-the-scenes.html
[Accessed 22 February 2010].
Wood, D. (2006) Map Art, Cartographic Perspectives, 53, pp5-14.
Wood, D. and Krygier, J. (2009) Maps, in N. Thrift and R. Kitchin, eds., The International
Encyclopedia of Human Geography. New York: Elsevier: pp421-430
Zook, M. A. and Graham, M. (2007a) The creative reconstruction of the Internet: Google and
the privatization of cyberspace and DigiPlace, Geoforum, p1322-1343.
Zook, M. A. and Graham, M. (2007b) Mapping DigiPlace: geocoded Internet data and the
representation of place, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34,
pp466-482.
Appendix A
A.i. Semi-structured Interview schedule for Jon Rafman
Give brief introduction – what I am doing, aims of the research, inform that the interview is
being recorded.
Could you give me some background as to the kind of things that generally interest you in
your artistic work?
- How does the Street Views project fit in with your other work? Is there a common
theme here
What first gave you the idea of using Street View in this way, to produce collections of
images?
- Is there something particularly interesting in the visual form of Street View? The way
the images are produced?
- A certain “truthful” quality of the images?
How did you go about producing the collections?
- How did you find images – process of collecting
- How did you choose images? Are there any particular type of scenes that interest
you the most? Or any particular individual images? Why?
- Did you have certain ideas in mind when looking for images? Or did images provoke
you to think about artistic precedents etc.
Do you think that there is a wider significance in having the world offered up for our gaze in
this way by Google?
- What do you think of the privacy issues that have been raised?
- Do you see this as a form of surveillance?
- Is Google’s ability and power – their capacity to “frame out cognitions and
perceptions” a concern? Why?
In my research, and certainly in the opinion of Google, Street View is about representing
places, giving a “sense of place” that other maps can’t, yet it seems that in your collections
you are more interested in images of people than of places, why is this?
- Why did you not include the location of the images in your collections
- What do you think the significance is of presenting these images out of context, as a
collection of photos, rather than as elements of a mapping environment? Does this
change their meaning?
- Do you even think of Street View as a map?

A.ii. Interview Transcript
Interview with Jon Rafman, 5/4/2010, 11pm GMT (6pm EST), conducted via Internet
phone (Skype)
BC = Ben Connor, interviewer
JR = Jon Rafman
Prior to recording, exchange greetings, I explain that I am just setting up the program to
record the conversation and ask Jon if this is OK, he says that it is fine.
BC: Thanks a lot...alright, well I’ll just let you know what I’m doing with my project and stuff.
As I said in the email I’m studying geography at the University of Bristol, and so for my
masters research project I’ve been looking at Google Street View, and you know, as part of
that I’ve been trying to kind of look at how people have like responded to it and reacted to it
differently. So like over here certainly a lot of that kind of response has been about debates
about invasion of privacy and stuff like that. So I found your work online that you’ve done
with Street View and I found it interesting as a different take on this new technology, and so
yeah, I just wanted to ask you a few questions about the work that you’ve done with Street
View and kind of your thoughts on this new technology and that.
JR: Right...I mean...ask away
BC: OK, so yeah first like, could you just give me some kind of background as to your work as
a whole as an artist, what kind of stuff do you try and do.
JR: So, basically, Google Street View emerged out of, one second [There is a phone ringing in
the background, Jon goes to turn it off]. Sorry, so it emerged out of...I’m a new media artist,
and it emerged out of my practice of surfing the Internet basically, and I saw like Street
View, surfing Street View as like in a way a perfect extension of my practice, which in many
respects was inspired by like what I found online and basically Web 2.0 culture, Internet
culture today and how that reflected the contemporary consciousness in general, and that
by focussing....Google Street View has this sister project which is called Kool Aid Man in
second life. Are you familiar with that one?
BC: Yeah, I saw it refereed to on your website...
JR: Yeah, in both projects I see myself as a flâneur...I mean in the nineteenth century
Baudelairean sense, and there’s a certain sense of that’s tongue in cheek, but on one level it
is somewhat of me being a flâneur, because it allows you to...surfing the Internet in general
allows you that same sort of detached neutral gaze that’s at the same time apathetic, that
you might have found in like walking the streets, the arcades of Paris in the nineteenth
century. So, first of all, in a way I found like Google Street View just from a perspective of
photography as in a way reflecting, or almost...it’s like the logical conclusion of photography
in some respects, and I use my...the theory that I was adhering to, was inspiring me was that
of Kracauer, and other like Frankfurt School theorists, like Adorno and Benjamin. In a way,
like Benjamin, I see photography as the medium that’s reflected the twentieth century, and
sort of the alienation, the self-alienation that occurs, and how...like in contrast to let’s say a
painting , which is like, for much of history was a mirror, was seen as like, representative of
reality, the painter represents reality, but somehow like photography just quickly took over
as the like more objective representation, and it seems like to us just almost intuitive...yeah,
it’s more representative of reality because its neutral, and it reflects the light perfectly...of
like...it reflects space right, it seems like it mimics what our eyes do, but I think there are
much more deeper things that are going out there...what was it about photography at the
turn of the...in the nineteenth century, and then up until the twentieth century with the
advent of cinema that was like somehow so...I mean, you can use a photograph in a court of
law right, but you can’t really use a painting in like proving something. So why is it that the
photograph that is seen in many cases as objective, and true of what like its representing. So
I think that the reasons it does is like reflect on what the modern consciousness is, and like
the way that the photograph sort of captures reality, it mimics in a way...the modernist view
of the subject, and then I saw that in Street View in the twenty-first century as taking that to
even the next step, where like not only is it a photography but it’s like photographing the
entire world, and there’s no photographer in a way, it’s like an automated camera, and ...at
least with the photographer you have like some agency, he chose, he pointed at this instead
of that, and in a way there’s still human meaning there. But with the Street View cameras
it’s like literally just an automated camera that’s taking a picture every few seconds that’s
going across the free world. The only thing that unites the images is spatial...is geography in
a way, it’s the spatial contiguity. And in a way that’s like, it takes the alienation that was first
present in a photograph in itself...in a painting there’s a direct connection, there’s the artist,
and his interpretation of what he sees, in a way it’s very connected to his subjective vision of
reality. Well with the photograph it’s already taken that away and having it mechanical, and
yet there’s still the photographer. And here it’s the next step, there’s no photographer, and
it’s all connected just through geospatial contiguity. So in a way it’s like...I don’t see...I think
it’s still connected to modernity in a way...if its postmodernity it’s not like a break, it’s just
like a continuation to the next level, where know it’s like...I mean reality in way has been
sucked of meaning to the point where it....I don’t want to call it like...I don’t like using the
word commodified, just throwing it around, but in a way it’s like the true, ultimate
commodification of reality in that respect, where it’s become data, pure data, and all data is
equal, so there’s no...no image is like more valued than the other image, there all just the
same, it’s all ones and zeros, or whatever you want, however you want to put it. So in a way
it’s like, maybe, first in modernity people were objectified and made into I don’t know,
objects that were just made to increase capital by........workers in the minds or whatever,
but now everybody’s made into information, information right, it’s like part of that
informationalising of everything. And I don’t want to make it like it’s all negative, it’s...like a
logical continuation....I can go on, if you want to ask another question to interrupt me just
feel free.
BC: no, it’s ok, keep going
JR: I’m going to ramble a bit, it will come out eventually...
BC: Yeah...
JR: So I guess like one question is like...who...you can blame Google, because like Google’s
the one who’s doing it, but on one level...I feel like it’s more than that. The reason why this
is happening, the grounds are already sown for this; it’s almost...the reason why we are
accepting it to a large extent... I mean there is a lot of uproar in Europe, but I mean in North
America, it’s pretty new the criticism, and to a large extent people see it more as a beneficial
tool, and like the 1984 mentality of Big Brother has kind of been transformed into like...we
all have access to the information, it’s not like it’s an authoritarian dictatorship that controls
all of this. To some extent its democratic, it’s not like Google is hoarding it and selling it off.
It’s going to be monetised still, but on one level it’s democratic, and there’s something in a
way strangely pleasurable about the voyeurism that it allows. It’s not the same as the 1984,
it’s like qualitatively different. It would be naive to say that its completely democratic, the
control the source code or whatever, they still own the copyright to the images, but it’s not
so clear cut as you know, 1984 type reality where it’s just like some Big Brother watching
over everybody. I’m sceptical about the pure demonization of Google, because in a way it is
still just a capitalist organisation...I think Google thinks it is a morally...I mean it sees itself as
like a morally right organisation that’s trying to like, be good, be like ethically correct in
decision making, which is problematic in one sense, because its...what is good right, its
philosophical, it raises philosophical. I don’t think Google...like it has no desire to like create
this image of itself as Big Brother, a centralised Big Brother organisation, it would be bad for
its self image economically, it wants to be transparent, and it will do whatever it can to seem
transparent and good for its own benefit ultimately. So I think it’s different from like CCTV or
whatever. I can go on...I mean like how much of your article is about the surveillance
aspects...because to me it wasn’t....in a way it was like the least interesting aspect of all of
it... I do...it is important and like everybody’s talking about it so I do have a lot of opinions
about it, but if it’s not like a huge aspect of what you’re doing...
BC: Well I’ve kind of done a section about the surveillance and privacy issues related to kind
of how it’s been reported in the media here in England. That’s interesting, but I was
interested in how you see that as only a small part of it...
JR: I think it’s like been transformed a little bit, ideas of surveillance amongst us have been
transformed...like become a little bit more friendly, like Facebook is the ultimate surveillance
right, I think it’s a generational thing and also a societal thing, like in Europe there is a history
of Stalinism and Fascism that’s not in North America. There’s a little bit of that, and there’s
also just like the anti-Americanism of like an American corporation coming in, it’s all those
things. I think it’s dangerous, it obscures the truth to like focus on the surveillance as the
main thing because in a way it obfuscates a deeper ideology that’s at work I think, and that’s
about what I was... alluding to a little bit...with you now, how all reality is commodified, and
that’s not the same thing as like Google’s an evil corporation that is spying on the population
of the world. In a way Google is no more culpable than any other corporation, or
anybody...in a way it’s the truest manifestation of this reality, of this abstract order that’s at
work in the world right now. In a way it...it’s a symptom of this in its most acute form in
some respects, that’s what attracted to me. But it’s like...it’s not that it’s positive or
negative, it’s a social fact, this, now what does it say about society right now? That’s kind of
like what I’m interest in, and I don’ know, I think paranoia about it sometimes is kind of like a
hidden megalomania, like what’s so important about your life that Google’s capturing that
you’re so paranoid. Is there...sometimes it’s a way to excuse your own narcissism by
attacking it...by making it seem like your being spied on. Being excessively paranoid I think
reveals a certain kind of hidden, I don’t know, narcissism, in some respects. I don’t want to
harp on that too much though. I mean you can get all psychoanalytic about it, about you
know what’s going on too, with all the negative reaction, anyway....
BC: So, when...what were you trying to achieve, I’ve been looking at your Street View images
that you’ve got online, what were you kind of trying to achieve by collating the images in
that way?
JR: I think that in this day and age, with the content boom that’s occurred on the Internet,
there’s so much stuff, so much being created every second, so much information, creative
content, every kind of content imaginable out there, that curation in itself has become more
and more important in this world, as something necessary...I mean in a way Google in
itself...a search engine is a form of curation right...having this algorithm that finds the
most...your narrowing down information, but it’s still like automatic and dehumanising in
some respects. In a way or consciousness, the way we think about the world is completely
mediated by this algorithm that Google’s created in many respects. So I don’t think you can
take that back, you can change that or fight that and be like, no I’m just putting a stop to
that, that’s the nature of the world. But I do think that you can like highlight that and at the
same time maybe take a little bit of it back, or at least put an eddy here and there, or...I
don’t even know... I don’t want to say that....I don’t like to speculate on what art can
accomplish, I think it works on a very indirect level, some things change your consciousness
very indirectly, and maybe can lead to emancipation, but if you try to do that actively it
becomes propaganda and it actually doesn’t it work. It appears to me like a hermetic work of
art, like a modernist work of art can actually be more revolutionary than and agit-prop
poster right, that says “down with Israeli imperialism” of something like that. So through the
act of curation and through structuring this chaos or other structure, through remixing, you
can like re-establish the human within this dehumanised world. I mean on a simplest level
that’s what I think. In a way...it’s a classic humanist view of art work, its romantic in many
respects. Yet at the same time I don’t feel like I have the desire to create something new,
because it feels like everything’s been created. I’d rather go through all the information and
junk and everything create, curate out of that and maybe remix and change it, I mean just
the act of framing is a *+ of creation, so that’s how I kind of see... my process, like the
purpose as being, so ....yeah.
BC: OK, cool. So like, when you were producing these collections of Street View images,
what was it that you were looking for, were there any particular things in the images that
you wanted to draw attention to?
JR: Well, I guess for me...it depends on the specific collection...I had my processes. At first
it’s intuitive, and I’m taking a lot of stuff, I’m taking a lot of snapshots that I like, just on an
intuitive level, I mean it’s hard to explain what’s going on, I think your whole background as
an artist is at work, and it’s working like in your subconscious and you don’t even know
what’s going on. And once I have, like...you know...it’s like a first draft, I have a first draft to
gather a bunch of images, and I cut it down to different collections, so like a recent
collection I have is that I’m, and this might, I don’t know, relate to geography...it was about
the individual in the landscape. So I was comparing the individual in the landscape, like the
solitary individual in the landscape, of like a romantic landscape painting of the sublime, like
there’s that famous one by that German artist, what’s his name...slips me right now, but it’s
like this man whose back is to the canvas, I mean back is to the audience, and he’s looking
like over a huge cliff and it’s just like fog, and the romantic sublime. Part of the goal of art in
like the romantic era, or just like...basically ultimate human experience was that of
connecting to nature and like feeling the oneness with nature and that by experiencing the
sublime infinity, and the immensity of unexplainable, unconceivable, like either massiveness
of nature, or like infinitude, or just beyond beauty, like terror of nature. Like, in feeling that
it points back to your own freedom, feeling that there is like this possibility of the infinite,
points back to the human infinity inside of us right....at the same time you feel at one with
the universe and at the same time transcendent over it because you can indirectly begin to
conceive of it all as one entire like...an then how strikingly different..contrasting
that...romantic view between the one of like the man in the street view landscape...where
it’s just like you know, anonymous, blurred faces, with...surrounded by, ongoing, endless,
there is still that feeling of endless space, but I’m interested in like endless space...how the
same experience has changed in the modern, contemporary experience of man in the
landscape, and what that reveals about how, you know, experience has changed in general,
like the experience of reality, like what does that reveal...I’ll send you the essay.
BC: That would be great, thanks
JR: Um...yeah
BC: Yeah that’s great. Another thing I was thinking about is, obviously coming from my
background as a geography student, and also kind of from the way that Street View is talked
about my Google, it’s very much...I’ve been kind of thinking about it in relation to Google
maps, and how it’s kind of you know, a new way of mapping the world. And yet, I don’t
know, I get a sense in your work, in your approach to it, you see it more as photography, and
the photographic aspect, the photographing of individuals as more important than the
mapping aspect in terms of depicting places. So yeah, I wondered what you thought about
that point.
JR: I think....what I find is interesting is the...it changes our view of space, because I think as
Street View and Google become more wired into our everyday lives, when everybody has an
iphone and like, iphones can easily access, you know Google Maps...well they can already
easily access Google Maps and Google Street View, in a way you’re like...it completely
changes your view of space, because now you can see what’s around the block at your
fingertips...it modifies...even distances seem different because everything is...you have
another perspective on it that’s in this digital realm right, and in a way it becomes like, you
know, McLuhan, it becomes an extension of your own mind. So in many respects, yeah, the
mapping, I’m not sure it’s so reflected in my photographs, but yeah, I definitely agree with
you in that...these technologies, especially these mass ones like Google Maps, that are like
used by everybody practically, become extensions of our own perceptions of space, and
alter it to some degree, or mediate it. And yeah....you don’t have to go to places any more to
get the pedestrian perspective of something, that’s huge. Or you’ve already experienced it
through Google Street View, and then when you do see it it’s like what does that do to your
experience of it, when you’ve already experienced it in that virtual space. There’s a lot of
interesting questions that it raises, but yeah, I’m not sure how the photographs, I mean the
photographs...I’ve been working on a piece right now where it’s like yeah, you know...I have
a picture of ....an abandoned house that says “Rod Stewart fan club”, imagine, I’m
thinking...I’m going to England next month for a conference ...if you’re in Manchester, I’m
presenting my Google Street Views there
BC: Oh really
JR: I’ll give you the dates; I think it’s like the thirteenth
BC: Oh, that’s the date that...
JR: Bristol’s down south?
BC: Yeah, Bristol’s down south, I would definitely have gone, but that’s the date that my
thesis is handed in, the 13th of May
JR: Oh really, oh well
BC: So that’s shame
JR: Well I’m just thinking, I’m thinking of making a short film, or like, have you ever heard, do
you know the story, or the movie “Blowup”, you know, it’s like from the 60s.
BC: No I don’t
JR: It’s by Antonioni, it’s like this movie in the 60s called blowup, where it’s about a
photographer who, it actually takes place in London, and he accidentally takes a picture of a
murder...but he doesn’t realise it, he’s going through his pictures and he thinks he sees a
gun, and he thinks he sees a body in the background, so then he blows up the body but then
as it gets closer and close her loses the image...if you blow something up more and more it
kind of becomes pure abstraction right. And then he goes, and he actually finds the body in
the park but like doesn’t call the police, then he comes back and the body’s gone, and then
he’s confused as to...basically there’s a mystery in the photograph that he can’t solve, and
he doesn’t even try to solve, because there’s no way he’s morally ready to solve that
mystery. So in some respects Street View is like the ultimate example of that, because you
know, there’s like tons of mysteries in these images that are not...that are being
captured...maybe there is...a murder was captured on Street View...you know there’s that
report a concern button but what does that even do, who are you reporting a concern to, on
one level it’s like the ultimate....you used to have to do that you know...Jamieson says this,
people used to actually feel profound grief when something sad happened, then it became
to the point where you have to like, you don’t have to necessarily feel the grief but you have
to show, you know, like the right signs that your experiencing the grief. But now it reaches
the point like you know, let’s say you see something bad on Street View, all you have to do is
report a concern by pressing a button, in a way it’s like it’s the ultimate...I’m not sure how
that led to “Blowup”, but yeah, I guess it’s like the sense in Blowup of like the photographer
in a way has to be able to see his own picture. What happens when the photographer isn’t
even able to see the truth in his own images...just like that question, its raising that
question, a photographer can’t see the truth in his own images, can’t see the violence
behind his own images, what’s that saying about society, and like Google Street View I see as
like, there is no photographer even, who’s the photographer? What happens in that case, it
goes from the photographer can’t see the truth behind his own images to what’s the truth if
there is no photographer, did somebody really get killed on that street corner when the
Google Street View truck was passing by, I don’t know. You see what I’m saying kind of?
BC: Yeah I do, yeah.
JR: I’m interested in mostly the epistemological questions it raises, and what it says about
epistemology right now and consciousness right now, and what that reflects about our
present age, and in a way, yeah, I think Google Street View is a great manifestation of the
present view of reality, which is a Google-ised reality. It’s not like Google is...Google is
changing our perception of reality on one level, but at the same time it’s an acute
representation of what’s already there, it’s a manifestation of what’s already underlying...it’s
a dialectic that’s at work, the same thing for what we were saying about space, and how
these technologies affect our perception of space, I don’t think it’s going one way, I don’t
think it’s just like its changing our perception of space...the seeds of that are already there in
our mind and in a way this is just...things are accepted...I think photography originally in the
nineteenth century like took off partly because it corresponded already to like our modern
consciousness, like I was saying before. It’s not so much like a technology emerges and
changes...technology emerges out of the consciousness that’s already laid the ground for it,
that’s why we can see, why we created technology in the first place you know. It’s not so...I
don’t like views of the change of history as technologically determined, I think it’s much
more complex than that, like more a dialectic. Anyways...
BC: Yeah, I agree with that yeah
JR: So can I ask you a question?
BC: Yeah, go ahead
JR: Like first of all, geography, I always wondered, tell me, what’s like geography, what
aspects of geography, geography seems so massive to me, what’s it like these days in
academia, what is geography these days? Or is it a lot of things depending on your
department?
BC: Yeah I think, you view of it seeming very massive is probably...
JR: Or is it just like other social sciences, where it doesn’t have its grounds...are very...what’s
like the foundation, where does its foundation lie these days? Is it unstable? I feel like it’s an
exciting discipline to be in.
BC: Yeah, certainly in the UK, I think its perhaps different in North America, different
departments and stuff, but yeah it is quite, as you say, the boundaries aren’t very fixed,
certainly over the last twenty years or so, the definition of what geography is, especially
human geography, as opposed to physical geography, I mean physical geography, you know,
glaciers, mountains, rivers and stuff is still quite fixed but then human geography is kind of
developing in a lot of interesting ways, the project that I’m doing, the context that that has
kind of emerged out of, starting to do it I was approaching from you know, quite a
traditional geographical topic, looking at mapping and how the world is mapped and you
know, as I said before it branches out into a lot of other things. To try and pin down what
the central thing is with geography, I guess the issues of space and place are perhaps the
things...
JR: So nowadays the Internet’s so huge, so much a part of present life, is there geographies
of virtual space, cyberspace, how do you tackle that?
BC: Yeah, probably in two senses really, there’s work being done on the physical geographies
of cyberspace, in terms of looking at where people are connected, and you know, kind of
networks that are growing up around that, both in terms of people and the actual
infrastructure and stuff. And also kind of, you know, yeah, this idea of virtual space, and
there’s some people, certainly there’s been some PhD students here at Bristol looking at like
computer games and stuff, and that idea of virtual space, and so I think Street View also kind
of relates in to that, it blurs the boundaries between what you think of as a map and it also
in some ways resembles that kind of virtual space of a computer game and stuff like that.
JR: Yeah, it does. What are you looking at, are you looking at it in terms of how it affects our
view of real space, or are you looking at how mapping, how virtual maps like Google Maps
and Street View affect our perception of real space, is that what you’re interested in?
BC: Yeah, I would say that that probably is kind of...I mean because, you know, Google Street
View, with it being quite new, no one’s really looked at it from an academic geographical
perspective before, so I’ve been trying to take kind of quite an exploratory approach to it,
but I think that question of how it affects our perceptions of real is quite important, that’s
probably quite a central question. I think there’s something quite significant in this...shift
just in visual form, from you know the very kind of what’s been naturalised as a conventional
map, in terms of a top down, abstracted view, and then Street View kind of challenges that
with the photographs and the Street level perspective. I’m trying to look at the significance
of that and as I said before, trying to look at how people have interpreted that in different
ways, which is why I was interested in, you know, talking to you and getting kind of a
different perspective, perhaps a more interesting perspective than what is generally rolled
out in the media and stuff.
JR: I’m just thinking if there’s anything else that I can say off the top of my head.
BC: Well, I think, all the points that I had written down have...
JR: Feel free to ask me any...email me if there’s anything else that hasn’t been covered
BC: I think you’ve covered everything really yeah.
JR: Well I’d love, to see, to read your thesis when you’re done, if you don’t mind.
BC: Yeah sure, I’ll email you a copy when I’ve done...
JR: Do you like your professors, do you feel like they’re, they understand what you’re doing,
or are they doing any sort of similar research?
BC: Well my supervisor, is...yeah she’s really good, I do like her...she kind of...her work tends
to be...she’s done some work on Google Earth, she does also a lot of historical stuff, to do
with maps and landscape representations and stuff, so she’s been looking at Google Earth
and trying to trace some of the continuities with some of the atlases in the past and also the
materialities of it as much as how it represents space, and also how people interact with it,
how you’ve got, with Google Earth obviously , the way that people can contribute to it and
add their own information, and relating that back to how atlases used to be circulated
around and people would add annotations.
JR: From any researcher’s perspective, imagine Google Street View fifty years from now,
when Google will have a historical...you will be able to see a neighbourhood change in a
given city, you know, perfectly, or at least from the street perspective, and from the satellite
perspective, just imagine how valuable that information is, and the fact that one company
owns this, are geographers...I guess maybe institutions will have to pay a fee to have access
to that information, it will be interesting...I mean it’s really interesting to see what’s going to
happen with all that...just as an archive you know
BC: Yeah, and we’re really only at the start of that kind of thing I think
JR: And from a moral standpoint it is something to be sceptical of, but that’s not to blow it
out of proportion and not to compare it to a fascist dictatorship, but it is you know a big
corporation that’s commodifying our space around us, but maybe it’s because we already
see space that way, do we not look at the person we walk by in a busy street as just a...there
is something like that represented in it, how we see reality on one level. Anyways, I think I’ve
pushed my point home pretty much. Yeah, just keep in touch man.
BC: Yeah, that’s great, thanks a lot, thank you yeah, really thanks a lot for your time.
JR: And yeah, send me the essay.
BC: Yeah I will do.
JR: Good luck, and feel free to ask me anything
BC: Thanks a lot
JR: Alright
BC: Ok, see you, bye.

Appendix B
Email transcript from asynchronous online interview with Bill Guffey.
Hi Ben,
Here are some answers to your questions. If you have any follow-ups just let me know.
What gave you the idea of using Street View as an artistic resource?
I had liked the idea of traveling to cities and countries virtually, and enjoyed "walking" up
and down streets looking at the areas that tourists don't normally go. I began to find areas,
buildings, etc. that I thought would make great paintings. So I contacted Google to ask
permission (which they have given for any artist to use Street View).
What qualities do you see in the Street View images that attracted you to using them as
artistic inspiration?
The vastness of the reference material. Virtually endless.
How do you go about finding and selecting Street Views for your paintings?
I sometimes use the search function to get myself into areas I'm interested in. If I want a
grungy, more dirty, area of a city I'll search for tatto shops or biker bars. That will usually get
me in the general vacinity and I can look around from there. Same goes for all places. If I
want a vineyard I search for it to get me in the general area.
What do you look for in an image to paint from?
Composition mainly. I can change the colors and the values easily enough. I also change the
comp, but there has to be something there that caught my eye to begin with. Then the
artistic license kicks in.
What do you think is gained and lost by using Street View rather than painting from real
world observation?
Gained...The ability to see the world with endless opportunities to use the material that's
already there. I just can't get to it in person. Sometimes I'll find a building that interests me
and I'll save it for inclusion in a future painting.
Lost...Nothing beats painting from life. Nothing. Street View is fun, but unless you, as an
artist, are grounded in the fundamentals of landscape painting, it just won't work. You have
to have the knowledge before painting from photographs. On a technical note, the
perspective is skewed and pushed in Street View. Compensation must be made for it to look
believable in a painting.
A lot of people seem to be contributing to your "Virtual Paintouts", why do you think the
response has been so enthusiastic?
It's something new. Not many people were painting from Street View before I started, but
there are many now that see the value in the reference material. Also, people like doing
something together that they all enjoy. Artists especially, have always done this.
In Europe Street View has caused a considerable amount of controversy due to people
seeing the images as a violation of their privacy. What do you think of these issues and is it
something you worry about when producing your paintings?
If I walked down the sidewalk with a camera, and took pictures of the different houses; that
is not illegal. Or, in my humble opinion, a violation of privacy. The cameras on the vehicles
are the same. There are differences of course. But I just don't see the problem. I think it's a
good reason to take down your Christmas lights, clean up the mess, and mow your yard. I
don't worry about it.
Do you think you will continue to use Street View as an artistic resource in the future?
Yes. Endless resource of reference material.
Are there any other particular projects using Street View that you are looking to do?
I've got several series planned. Some of particular cities. Some of certain subjects. I also
want to continue my effort to spread the word about using Street View for artists that are
disabled. That area has really yet to be touched, and the implications are huge.
Thanks,
Bill
-------------
Bill Guffey
P.O. Box 785
Burkesville, KY 42717
cell: 270-406-0189
home: 270-864-3737
Check out my website at:

www.bnguffey.com
and my blog at:

http://billguffey.blogspot.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "B Connor" <bc6460@bristol.ac.uk>
To: "Bill Guffey" <bnguffey@windstream.net>
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2010 3:46 AM
Subject: Re: Inquiry from your website
Bill,
Thank you very much for your help. Just to give you a sense of what I am doing, as part of
my research project I am looking at how people have interacted and engaged with Street
View in different ways, and your art projects struck me as a really interesting example of
this. Please feel free to write as little or as much as you like regarding each question, and if
you have any additional comments that you think might be of interest then I will be glad to
hear them! Please don't worry if you do not have time to respond immediately. Here are
the questions I am interested in hearing our response to:
What gave you the idea of using Street View as an artistic resource?
What qualities do you see in the Street View images that attracted you to using them as
artistic inspiration?
How do you go about finding and selecting Street Views for your paintings?
What do you look for in an image to paint from?

What do you think is gained and lost by using Street View rather than painting from real
world observation?
A lot of people seem to be contributing to your "Virtual Paintouts", why do you think the
response has been so enthusiastic?
In Europe Street View has caused a considerable amount of controversy due to people
seeing the images as a violation of their privacy. What do you think of these issues and is it
something you worry about when producing your paintings?
Do you think you will continue to use Street View as an artistic resource in the future? Are
there any other particular projects using Street View that you are looking to do?
Thanks again for your help, it is much appreciated.
Ben
On 24 February 2010 07:36 -0600 Bill Guffey <bnguffey@windstream.net> wrote:
Hello Ben. I'll help in any way I can. Just let me know.
Bill
-------------
Bill Guffey
P.O. Box 785
Burkesville, KY 42717
cell: 270-406-0189
home: 270-864-3737
Check out my website at:

www.bnguffey.com
and my blog at:

http://billguffey.blogspot.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ben Connor" <bc6460@bristol.ac.uk>
To: "Bill Guffey" <bnguffey@windstream.net>

Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 4:18 AM
Subject: Inquiry from your website
Hi Bill,
Ben Connor has sent you a message via your "Contact" form on your Artspan website. You
can respond to them by simply replying to this email. Their message is below.
Visitor Message:
Dear Mr Guffey,
I am a Masters student studying geography at the University of Bristol, England. For my

research project I am investigating Google Street View, and am interested in finding out
how people have engaged with this technology in different ways. I am therefore
interested in finding out more about your art projects using Street View, and would like to
ask if it would be possible for me to email you some questions on this topic to assist me
with my research. If you would be willing to answer some questions then please let me
know, and I will send them via email in the next few days. Thank you for your time,
Yours sincerely,
Ben Connor
Message sent from website: www.bnguffey.com

----------------------
B Connor
bc6460@bristol.ac.uk

The Virtual Flaneur? Exploring Google Street View

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Virtual Flaneur? Exploring Google Street View

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ben Connor The Virtual Flâneur?

THE VIRTUAL FLÂNEUR?

Total word count: 14995 words.

This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, Peter Swann, although in his eyes, an

iv. List of Tables .......................................................................................................................... 6

7.2. Where next?.................................................................................................................. 58

iv. List of Tables

1.1. Sources for discourse analysis p14

1.1. The familiar and the exotic in Google Street View p9

1.2. Guidelines for discourse analysis p12

3.1. Google Maps p25

3.2. Google Earth p26

4.2. Moments in time captured by Google Street View p33

satellite image p34

5.1. “Report a concern” on Google Street View p37

5.2. British Special Air Service base, Credenhill, Herefordshire p42

6.1. Bill Guffey’s Street View art websites p47

1.1. Why Google Street View?

1. To investigate the significance of mapping the world not from an

2. To understand and explain the media discourses that have constructed

3. To consider how we might look beyond the restrictive purview of these

1.2.1. Visual ethnography

Thus rather than focusing solely on a semiotic or iconographic interpretation of the

1.2.2. Discourse analysis

Guidelines for discourse analysis

1. Suspension of existing categories:

2. Familiarisation: immersion in texts through repeated re-reading;

4. Persuasion: Investigate construction of “truth” claims within texts;

5. Incoherence: note inconsistencies within texts;

6. Active presence of the invisible: look for mechanisms that silence;

Category Title Author Source Date

Defending the public space M. Cross The Guardian 26/4/09

Don’t zoom in on Google’s Street View M. Cross The Guardian 7/4/09

Table 1.1. Sources for discourse analysis

2. Representing the world

2.1. The cartographic gaze

2.2. Critical cartography: representational and post-representational

2.3. More-than-representational mappings

3. Contextualising Street View: a new mode of mapping?

3.1. “Is Google good for geography”8?

3.2. Beyond the fear-hope dialectic

4. Street View in focus

4.1. Experiencing Street View

hovering lower, suspended above a city represented through a combination of naturalistic

4.2. The virtual flâneur

5. Contesting Street View

5.1. Maps, surveillance and privacy

If privacy is understood as the possibility of restricting the exposure of something, then

5.5. An Invasion of Privacy?

6. Rethinking Street View

6.1. Street View as virtual travel

6.2. Street View as self-expression

6.3. Street View as modern experience

the logical conclusion of the commodification of “cartographic rationality and its

6.4. Multiple meanings

7.2. Where next?

Aday, S. and Livingston, S. (2009) NGOs as intelligence agencies: The empowerment of

Big Brother Watch (2010) Mission Statement [Online]. Available at:

Cellan-Jones, R. (2009) The Battle of Broughton, [Online] Available at:

Cosgrove, D. (1999) Introduction: Mapping Meaning, in D. Cosgrove, ed., Mappings. London:

Cosgrove, D. (2006) Art and Mapping: An Introduction, Cartographic Perspectives, 53, p4

Crampton, J. W. (2003a) The Political Mapping of Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

Crampton, J. W. (2003b) Cartographic Rationality and the Politics of Geosurveillance and

Crampton, J. W. (2010) Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS. Chichester: