A critical mediation on the Google Earth experience, by Anna Munster.

Excerpted from a recommended essay:

“I want to ask two key questions throughout this essay about Google Earth. First, what kind of image or image set does it render for us in relation to contemporary information culture? Its updating, mutating and compositing set of terrain and satellite images is often referred to as a “virtual globe”. Should we therefore understand GE’s representational status in terms of a simulated world? This may indeed be a fairly accessible way to begin thinking about the GE experience as something that takes its place in a long line of virtual environments from flight simulators through to fully interactive entertainment and aesthetic experiences such as the CAVE immersive virtual reality environment. Indeed, Google Earth could be thought, pursuing such analysis, as the ultimate of all simulations – a multi-user cyberspace map of the world that is becoming the reference point for the earth’s actual geography.

The second question follows from this and pertains to its status as an online environment.

Should Google Earth be considered more than a map, more than imaging or even simulation of the world and instead as a shared, networked environment? In many other multi-user online tools and environments such as games, sociable media, for example MySpace and web publishing (blogs and wikis, for instance) the presence and activity of others constitutes the experience to be had and spurs further development of these environments. The term “sociable media” has been used to think through the participatory and networked nature of such spaces.Is Google Earth a type of sociable media rather than a set of images of the world?

What seems extraordinary about Google Earth is that it is a complete visual environment at the same time as it is an almost total imaging of the world. If Google Earth is to be thought of as sociable media then its virtual globe status may elevate it to the ultimate in sociable-virtual mediation. Google Earth might be thought of as a convergence of image and sociality where new transformations in visual practice, use and understanding are caught up with or are co-emergent with transformations and experiments around new socialities.

There are buildings, tanks, trees and monuments represented in the data sets but never any sense of co-habitation of the environment with others. This distinguishes Google Earth, again, from other online environments such as blogs, social software networking and tools as well as gaming where the presence of, and relation to, others (albeit sometimes homogenised and somewhat forced) assume primary status. The GE environment is one in which there are many individual users in full flight but no dimension of the social within its visual space.

The point I want to make here may seem obvious and yet its implication is quite profound – the sociability of Google Earth as an exemplar of distributed, networked media lies outside the actual visual environment and aesthetic experience of traversing the GE globe. What I want to suggest, then, is that the relations between aesthetics and sociality that are thrown up by Google Earth span an aporia that is axiomatic to contemporary networked cultures. This aporia is produced and reproduced throughout networked media and relationships: the offer of both an aesthesia of hyper-individuated and solitary, nodal experience and the potential for new forms of collective practice, formation and enunciation.”