There weren’t many such points along the section of the European Route E10 road we were on, in a region with a very low population density and mostly flat stretches of industrial forest plantations. The road connects the industrial city Luleå in Sweden (home of Facebook’s massive new data center, cooled by the northern climate and powered by cheap local hydropower) and the picturesque fishing village Å at the very tip of the Lofoten Islands in Norway. On the way there, the road passes through mountains and arctic tundra, boreal forests and lake-dotted plains.

As we passed through this landscape by car, however, we were mostly struck by the monotony of it all.

Our car was filled to the brim, children and dogs and all. Halfway through the two-day trek to see family in Norway, my wife was at the wheel. I was fiddling around with my brand new iPhone, which truly seemed a magical product after years with Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. The large touchscreen, the integrated GPS, and the 3G data connection made the phone a window to the world where data and the physical finally coexisted and interacted in a way that felt right to me. It was also a window into the behaviors of other people accessing this world.

Someone—I do not know who—had used Gowalla to tag this little island in the middle of the lake as a point of interest, and so the island became interesting to me. The chance meeting with this island, which existed to me only as a data point, has remained in my mind for years. What did the existence of the island, not as a physical place in the middle of a lake in Northern Sweden, but as a digital place discovered on my phone, really mean?

From the road, places like the little island in the middle of the lake were invisible and undiscoverable. The countryside could seem mostly empty for outsiders and people, like us, passing through. Yet, they are storied landscapes, inhabited for centuries by people with shifting and sometimes competing ways of using the land. There are traces everywhere. Signs by the road alert drivers to officially designated points of interest such as national parks, war memorials, the massive World Heritage Site Laponia. Travelers interested in what historian of technology David Nye calls the technological sublime can observe giant mines, hydropower plants, and the occasional wind turbine—all signs of significant human interventions in the landscape. Rickety moose-hunting towers, animal crossing signs, and black plastic sacks tied to sticks along the road—to indicate the presence of herded reindeer—hint at humans and animals co-existing and interacting, no matter how empty the road may seem at times. Look closely enough, and the land is suddenly very crowded with layers upon layers of history.

Visitors and travelers have been able to learn about these and other points of interest through maps and travel guides for a long time. Throughout the 19th century, urban travelers turned the Scandinavian countryside into a tourist destination by exploring, mapping, and writing extensively about what they considered areas worth seeing. Published since 1886, the Swedish Tourist Association’s annual book demonstrates how its authors directed visitors to particular places and vistas. For instance, the first volume provided directions to the most accessible glaciers in Lapland. Descending from the Walli mountain toward the Njåtso valley, the book advised, would give you the most spectacular views of massive glaciers.

More modern travel guides like Lonely Planet and Rough Guides belong in this tradition, but have recently come under strong pressure from digital media. Geosocial networking apps are, in other words, only the latest in a long history of making places shareable and findable through media. They should, however, be considered platforms rather than stand-alone products, dependent on crowdsourced information for all but the most iconic points of interest. The GPS-enabled smartphone gives us a dynamic window into this world. While certainly not the only possible view of space and its meanings, Gowalla and other geosocial networking apps opened up the landscape and covered it in data generated by people who had passed by, lived here, experienced these places, and then chosen to share them.

The accurate GPS navigation that these geosocial networking apps depend on is something relatively new. Patented to the Naval Research Laboratory scientist Roger Easton in 1974, the history of the GPS is a classic story of a military technology that eventually became something we think of as a common good that we all can access, not unlike the Internet. When President Bill Clinton discontinued the so-called Selective Availability practice of intentionally degrading GPS signals for the general public for national security reasons in May 2000, the geospatial consumer market exploded. Today, networked GPS sensors are ubiquitous, supporting a wide range of services and technologies.

Stories of the GPS and its influence generally focus on people being lost or not lost, of finding their way and possibly being blind to the world around them—instead experiencing it only on the screen. But my lost little island tells another story of place and location in the era of the GPS.

When Gowalla launched in 2009, a little over a year before my road trip, it was one of the first location-based social networks. Designed for GPS-enabled smartphones, Gowalla experimented with game-like features, allowing users to check into “Spots” that could again be organized into “Trips” in different categories. More importantly, users could add locations themselves, so Gowalla’s world map was populated as the service gained users around the world. Through Gowalla and competing services such as Foursquare, Yelp, Brightkite, and the more recent Findery, people tagged, ranked, and annotated the world around them, creating and interacting with complex shared representations of the places that mattered to people. These networks function as platforms for sharing and discovery of place and location, processes that generate this meaning.

While beautifully designed and loved by many of its users, Gowalla lost ground against its main competitor (Foursquare) before being purchased for the talent (sans user data) by Facebook in 2011. By then I had lost interest in Gowalla itself, as had many others, thanks to a lack of clear direction from Gowalla’s developers. I hardly noticed at the time.

A promised data-export option never materialized, so all the Spots and Trips registered by Gowalla’s users were lost. All these places that people had found and shared—the places they had made discoverable—were gone. I can never again find the little island in the middle of the lake.

The lost little island tells us something about the ephemeral nature of places in the digital world. We know that space becomes place as people imbue it with meaning over time. But places can be unmade, too, with the disappearance of the services that first made us aware of them. Physical places may continue to exist, but how integral to a place’s identity is its digital representation?

Social networks gain value as people invest their time and attention in them—as they share their lives and locations. The more people use a social network, the more valuable it is, not just to shareholders, but also as an engine for discovery. But the more of yourself and your world you invest in the network, the more vulnerable you are to its obsolescence.

The last few years have seen several new geosocial networks appear, such as Findery. Gowalla founder Josh Williams is launching a new one, too. Even with newcomers, some older networks like Foursquare are still around. Some of these will survive, but many will likely not. How many little islands will be lost with the next network to shut down?

Originally published with The Atlantic 24 June 2014.

The show has been a big hit in Norway – some 1.3 million people (of Norway’s roughly 5 million people) watched the show Thursday and Friday, which are quite impressive numbers, and I expect the weekend ratings will be even higher. The hashtag #hurtigruten has been quite active on Twitter as well. I’m not surprised that people are watching the show, but it’s been even more interesting to see all the people that show up along the coast, waving from land, cruising around in boats, and also the huge crowds at all the stops. The small places are generally the ones with the most people. My hometown Sortland (with 10,000 inhabitants), for instance, had more people show up at 3:30 at night than Trondheim (with 175,000 people) had in the middle of day. It seems like the experience of the show took people somewhat by surprise – the premise sounds quite ludicrous, like watching paint dry on live TV, but people took a look out of pure curiosity and then found it hard to stop. Twitter is full of people who seemed unable to turn off the TV and go to bed at night as Hurtigruten sailed through Vesterålen in the midnight sun.

I think there are many reasons why the Hurtigruten show stuck a chord in Norway. One of them has to do with history and nature. The infrastructural role of Hurtigruten as a critical means of transportation is long past. Once upon a time it was essential for bringing people, mail, and goods in a reliable way along the coast. It still brings cargo and people, of course, but today there are many other options available. Like many old technologies, Hurtigruten has found new life in new roles. More than anything else, Hurtigruten is a tourist ship now. But I think the show also demonstrates that Hurtigruten has become a part of the cultural landscape of coastal Norway and a way of experiencing and taking part in nature.

What can we say about this new genre of travel TV? Is it really a form of Baudrillardian simulacra, of mediated consumer culture imitating the real world? What is the relationship between the experience of being aboard Hurtigruten, experiencing nature first-hand, and watching it on TV? Right now I think of it as a form of augmented reality, a communal experience that adds to the physical experience. It may be mediated, but there is also something profound and tremendously powerful at work here (I hesitate to call it authentic, but perhaps I should).

The Hurtigruten show is a fantastic experience, culturally immersive and able to bring the entire country together in a way that few other TV programs have. But it is important to note that it is without the instant gratification of so much contemporary entertainment. In a way, it can be compared to the slow food movement. It is slow entertainment, meant to be stretched out and savored. In fact, I have seen several comment that NRK should go even slower, take out the interviews and documentaries, and just stick with the slowly changing landscapes as the ship progresses along the coast. I agree wholeheartedly.

Digital technologies and mediated environments

Now, in order to justify watching this show at work (and then taking the time to write a blog post about it) I want to highlight some possible lessons for environmental historians, digital humanists, and others in academia.

The last year I have been thinking much about the intersections between environmental history and the digital humanities. In what ways can digital technologies help us think about and analyze historical environments in new ways? How can we understand the new forms of storytelling that arise around mapping technologies (which I briefly blogged about before)? I’m involved in large a collaborative project between Umeå University and Stanford University project called Media Places, where we wish to explore the notion of mediated places in a broad sense. I want to use this project as a platform to look at the creation and mediation of natural sites and environments, and the Hurtigruten show seems to me a good example of this.

I think the website that NRK made for the show represents a great model for visualizing travel. As we see above, the site has three main elements: 1) a zoomable map with a red line marking the progress of Hurtigruten and markers for all the stops along the way. 2) a video window showing a live or archived video stream. Clicking anywhere along the red line on the map will show you the video for that spot. 3) a info window that shows you information about Hurtigruten, radar data, links to torrent downloads of raw video data in full HD (CC-licensed), and a link to a 3D view in Google Earth.

Using Google Maps, NRK has created a nice interface for following a journey in time and space. Two years ago I presented a paper at the American Society for Environmental History conference where I attempted to recreate the strenuous and time-consuming journey from Bergen to the Vøringsfossen waterfall in the late 1800s, one of the big, scenic tourist attractions at the time. If I had more experience with the Google Maps API I could probably create a website that would trace this journey and visualize it. Using layers, I could compare the route and speed for different points in time, such as 1900, 1950, and 2000, to get a feeling of the changing experience of space and distance. I think we have much to do in exploring other forms of narratives, of presenting and analyzing environmental history.

On the fringes of commercial services

We have several examples of similar experiments in mapping and storytelling. First, we have the predecessor to the Hurtigruten show, when NRK followed the Bergensbanen railroad from Oslo to Bergen, in realtime. After the show, NRK released a torrent with a 246 GB HD file (!), or a compressed 720p file at 22GB (which is still big enough to make things complicated) and encouraged mashups. 1.2 million Norwegians watched parts of the show, which was later released as a DVD.

Second, Google also made a railroad visualization, in a slightly different way, for the Transsiberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok {no longer functioning}.

Third, many may know Google and NORAD’s Santa Tracker, which tracks Santa flying across the globe at Christmas.

I think we are going to see many more such forays into hybrid narratives, using maps, video, text, and social networking. I am excited to see that public and commercial companies like NRK and Google exploring crazy ideas like the Hurtigruten show, that does not seem to have any immediate commercial appeal. And I’m curious to see how we in academia can learn from and refine what they are doing.

Here is my world map. As we can see, I spend most of my time in Northern Europe, but I’ve had several stops in the US. Of course, the data set is limited to the time since I bought my iPhone, which was about 8-9 months ago.

Looking closer at the US part, we see that I’ve been to Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, and Santa Fe since buying my phone. Chicago sticks out as a pretty small dot – I have stopped at O’Hare a while flying to Phoenix and Seattle and must have turned on my phone. I did fly through Newark a few days ago, but must not have turned on the phone then, since it did not show on the map.

As we zoom in on New Mexico, we see clearly how the data points map out on a grid, and one might reasonably think that I did not physically go to all these locations. Supposedly, the iPhone found the location by triangulating to nearby cell phone towers. It seems like I spent much more time in Albuquerque (south) than in Santa Fe (north), which is not true at all. We flew to Albuquerque, but only spent one day there. The rest of the time we were in Santa Fe. One day we drove out to Bandelier National Monument, which we can also see to the northwest of the map.

Zooming in on Phoenix, we see two concentrations on the map. I assume the darkest dot is around the Wyndham Hotel, and going east we can see the results of our very interesting bus ride to the Phoenix Zoo (reminder to self: taking the bus in the US is something entirely different than in Northern Europe…) Further up we can see a big concentration of dots around Taliesin West. Interestingly, one can’t really see the drive out there.

Jumping over to Europe, we see much traveling back and forth between northern Norway and Sweden, and big dots for Stockholm and Oslo, and smaller dots for Roskilde and Florence.

This is where it gets interesting. Here we see the results of our road trips between Umeå, Trondheim, and Mosjøen.

Finally, a zoomed in map of Umeå, the city I live in [sorry, this image got lost in a wordpress hack cleanup]. The grid is very obvious here, and the size of the dots do not accurately indicate where I’ve spent the most time (campus and my house). Instead, I think they must represent the cell phone antenna towers that register my phone the most often, and some of these must be bigger and more sensitive than others.

I like the stories that these maps tell. They also made me think of the way geotagging and mapping technologies have transformed our personal relationships to space. I wish that I had tagged every single one of the some 30,000 photos I have taken since I bought my first digital camera in the summer of 2004 (a Nikon D70, which I still use!) in time and space. I use Flickr and, increasingly, Picasaweb to share and make cloud backups of my photos, and both these services now have the option to display geotagged photos on maps. Flickr certainly seems like the best solution, since they can show all geotagged locations on a big map:

Here the map becomes a real tool for exploring places.

Picasaweb, on the other hand, only gives a tiny, cursory option to see all photo locations on a tiny little map, To see more detail, you need to look at individual albums:

Here we see again a map from our New Mexico trip. Not all that different from the iPhone generated one above.

I think personal mapping like this is still somewhat underexplored. Most advanced smartphones automatically geotag photos taken with them now, and I see that some compact digital cameras have started getting built-in GPS receivers. What will happen when all photos we take are reliably geotagged? As the last few days’ Apple controversy has demonstrated, there will be some privacy issues, but I think it holds the potential for some real exciting personal mapping services.

Samtidig tror jeg mange blir fanget i denne informasjonens abstrakte karakter. Det sies jo at fortiden er et annet land, men fortiden er også et annet landskap. Som historikere må vi ikke bare prøve å rekonstruere en annen tid og en annen kultur – jeg vil også hevde at vi bør tenke på fortiden som et konkret sted, med tidsbundne geografiske begrensninger og muligheter. For geografi har betydning for de historiene vi forteller. En slik påstand vil nok ikke overraske mange geografer, men historikere har nok godt av å tenke over både det fysiske landskapet historiene våre utspiller seg i og hvordan den tilgjengelige teknologiske infrastrukturen formet folks opplevelse av landskapet. Dette krever imidlertid en helt annen type stedssans.

Jeg har brukt mye tid de siste ukene på å lese kart og utforske gamle reiseskildringer. Helt konkret har jeg kikket på hvordan turister kom seg til Vøringfossen innerst i Hardangerfjorden. Denne var en av de store turistattraksjonene i Norge på slutten av 1800-tallet (og er det for så vidt fremdeles). I dag kan man sette seg i bilen i Bergen og kjøre helt fram til Vøringfossen på omtrent tre timer. Dersom en går tilbake til slutten av 1800-tallet så ting helt annerledes ut. Først måtte en ta dampskip opp gjennom Hardangerfjorden. Etter omtrent 14 timer i båt med mange stopp på veien kom en endelig fram til Eidfjord, hvor en i følge Dr. Yngvar Nielsens Reisehaandbog for Norge fra 1888 kunne overnatte på Brødrene Nesheims Hotell før en bega seg ut på den 8-9 timer lange turen til Vøringfossen og tilbake. Her kunne man for kr 3,20 leie en fører som også rodde en over Eidfjordvatnet. Derfra gikk en videre opp Måbødalen med dens ”lodrette Styrtninger, glatskurede Fjelde.” Ved Dalberget kunne en nyte ”Hus, Øl, Selters, Mad og Kvarter” før man ga seg ut på siste etappe. Etter nesten tre timer kom en til broen som Den norske turistforening bygde over Bjorøia og den ”tarvelige” stien som gikk de siste tre-fire kilometrene opp til selve fossen. Turistforeningen bygde denne stien tidlig på 1870-tallet og den ble da sett på som en voldsom forbedring av mulighetene for å oppleve fossen. Da prins Oscar åpnet veien i 1871 falt for øvrig statsråd Stang og hesten hans av veien og ned i ura, så veien var ikke helt ufarlig.

I dag parkerer en bilen ved toppen av fossen og kan gå ned til bunnen av fossen på knappe halvtimen. Dersom en ville oppleve fossen sett fra toppen i 1888 måtte en gå tilbake til Dalberget (noe som tok omtrent 4,5 timer) og opp en annen sti i 5,5 timer til gården på Høl. Her kunne en overnatte før en gikk den siste halvtimen fram til fossestupet. ”Forsigtig!” advarte Nielsen. Alt i alt krevde denne omturen altså 12 timers ekstra gange. Vøringfossen er kanskje like vakker (i hvert fall om sommeren, da vannkraftanlegget lenger opp i elva slipper ut mer vann for turistenes skyld), men jeg tror likevel opplevelsen av fossen var en helt annen nettopp på grunn av den omfattende reisen man måtte gjennom før en fikk oppleve fossen.

Å være turist i Norge på 1800-tallet var altså langt mer utfordrende enn det er i dag. Reising var tidkrevende og strevsomt, og til å begynne med forbeholdt en relativt liten gruppe av høyt utdannede og velstående herremenn (samt noen få damer). Noen av disse mennene gikk sammen for å stifte Den norske turistforening i 1868 for å hjelpe nye grupper reisende å oppleve autentisk norsk natur. Men for å oppnå dette måtte de temme både landskapet og ”de innfødte”. Turistforeningen bygde ikke bare hytter, men også veier og broer. De belønnet bønder som kunne tilby reisende godt losji og advarte mot dårlige steder. Turistforeningen kartla gamle stier og lagde nye ruter gjennom fjellheimen slik at folk uten stedssans også kunne oppleve norsk natur.

Resultatet ble på den ene siden at store grupper nordmenn (og også utenlandske turister) fikk muligheten til vandre i fjellheimen og oppleve attraksjoner som Vøringfossen i relativ komfort og sikkerhet. Samtidig vil jeg hevde at Turistforeningen skapte en disiplinert natur hvor noe av det som opprinnelig trakk fjellvandrerne dit gikk tapt. Turistforeningen selv kom også til denne konklusjonen på 1930-tallet og bremset sin voldsomme ekspansjon etter det. Men når en kombinerer Turistforeningens tilgjengeliggjøring av norske naturområder med den voldsomme utbyggingen av veier og jernbaner er det tydelig at noe skjedde med følelsen av avstand og opplevelsen av landskap på denne tiden.

Jeg tror at vi ikke kan forstå aktiviteten til Turistforeningen og den voldsomme interessen for norsk natur som oppsto på slutten av 1800-tallet uten en forståelse av det konkrete landskapet de måtte forholde seg til. Det norske landskapet var selvfølgelig i langt større grad en fysisk barriere enn det er i dag. Samtidig må vi tenke på det som et kulturlandskap med utgangspunkt i en annen kultur. Det er en utfordring for meg som historiker å rekonstruere hva 1800-tallets reisende så da de skuet ut over den norske fjellheimen. Vi har tegningene de tegnet, bildene de tok og ordene de skrev, men jeg er ikke sikker på om de betyr det samme for oss i dag som de gjorde den gang, nettopp fordi jeg tror vi er vant til å tenke på og reise gjennom landskap på en grunnleggende annen måte.

Det kan godt hende ivrige fjellvandrere er uenige med meg, og siste ord er nok ikke sagt her. Det er jo tross alt vinterferie nå som jeg skriver dette, og mange har nok brukt denne ferien på hytta i mer eller mindre nærkontakt med det norske landskapet. Selv setter jeg meg snart på flyet til USA – og det vil ta meg kortere tid enn det tok å gå fra bunnen til toppen av Vøringfossen i 1888 (selvfølgelig forutsatt at flyet ikke er kansellert igjen). Når jeg kommer tilbake har jeg planer om å gruble enda mer på norske naturopplevelser i historiske landskaper, med kart, kompass, GPS, bøker og støvete dokumenter som hjelpemidler for ikke å gå meg vill. Den historiske stedssansen må tross alt trenes opp!

Lenke til originalartikkel: https://blogg.forskning.no/finn-arne-jorgensen/den-historiske-stedssansen/1120039 (noen lenker oppdatert).