The History of GIS
The MIT Technology Review has an interesting piece on a tussle over the history of GIS map-making. At heart, the transparent overlays you see in Yahoo! SmartView. While the article looks for the conflict and the personalities, the section that really interested me talked about the bad uses of maps: the Depression-era "redlining" of areas containing minorities and poor people whom the city planners didn't want moving outside their suburbs. It's interesting to think of maps as enabling passive evil ("mauve people are mostly poor, many poor people default on loans, therefore don't lend to mauve people. Oh, and here's a map of where mauve people live in your city according to the latest census results") at the same time it enables so much good (see Wired News for the latest--maps of fat traps for kids).
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All things good that man invents are almost without exception in evil ways, eventually, it seems. Nuclear fusion, aeroplanes, and maps, to name just a few, have all been developed for good and humane purposes, one could argue, but have also seen a great number of evil uses.
Of course, the military has put a lot of resouces into deveopling GIS and related sciences (e.g. satellite positioning and remote sensing), however, one should absolutely not underestimate the hard work of civil researchers and developers around. These, I think, still out-number the military staff and has had the most significant impact on the development of GIS in the past and present.
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Mikel [06.01.05 02:31 AM]
Seems like some elements of "redlining" live on in marketing geography. Credit and purchase databases have very fine detail on consumption habits, with an awareness of your address. This leads to geographic profiles that influence decisions on distribution of goods and services, which can exagerate already present inequalities.
This looks even worse when played out on a global scale.