Fudan-LSE Lecture Series No.16

THE SPEAKER

Dr Jean-Christophe Plantin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE. His research investigates the politics of digital platforms, the evolution of knowledge infrastructures, and the rise of digital sovereignty. His work has been published in leading Media and Communications journals, such as Media, Culture & Society, New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Chinese Journal of Communication, and International Journal of Communication. His research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the European Regional Development Fund, and the University of Michigan MCubed Program. He is currently writing a monograph on the infrastructural evolution of digital platforms.

ABSTRACT

Google Maps has popularized a model of cartography as a platform, in which digital traces are collected through participation, crowdsourcing, or user’s data harvesting and used to constantly improve its mapping service. Based on this capacity, Google Maps has now attained a scale, reach, and social role similar to the existing infrastructures that typically organize cartographic knowledge in society. After describing Google Maps as a configuration relying on characteristics from both platforms and infrastructures, this article investigates what this hybrid configuration means for public participation in spatial knowledge in society. First, this turn to infrastructure for Google has consequences on the status of public participation in mapmaking, which switches from creating content to providing activities of maintenance of its database. Second, if Google Maps “opens up” cartography to participation, it simultaneously recentralizes this participatory knowledge to serve its corporate interests. In this hybrid configuration, cartographic knowledge is therefore simultaneously more participatory and more enclosed.