Google Street View

In reference to the readings of Manovich, he talks about databases, not one that is defined as a structure collective of data only in computer science, a storage space for faster retrieval, it could be basically anything but a simple collection of items. He also discusses on the many different models to organise data : hierarchical, network, relational and object- oriented. In addition, he goes on talking about how living in a “computerized society” has affected the way we organise our data.

The only example that I could find right now while still taking time to digest this entire reading is a service that Google has created over the years – Google Street View.
What this service does is that it allows users to view and navigate a 360 degree street level imagery of a certain place. Images can be viewed on the computer, and can be accessed through the use of the mobile phone as well, it acts like a virtual photo based street guide. This is the best invention ever by far for me! Never a fan of bearings, maps, numbers and directions, I figured having a visual of the particular location that I’m looking out for is so much more convenient.

As I’ve said before in my previous post that the company that I used to work for shared the same office space as Google. I was lucky enough to find myself seated right beside the people working on Google Streetview Singapore. It’s just toooooo much work putting all those photos together! A massive archive of mechanically photographed images, these people have created works of art through selecting, cropping, and adjusting the images.

In Manovich readings, he talks about how layers and layers are placed over one another to create a database of recored materials. Street View photographs are fragments taken out of the virtual world itself constructed by photographs of the real world. A marginalization of human figures, automatic blurring and disfiguring of faces and bodies, pixelation of the surface, and fragmentation of a space-time, all the while maintaining the indexicality of photography, this double nature of the photography as well as the particular operations involved in its two-fold transformation, not only does result in a curious tension between reality and fiction, but also provoke a sense of the uncanny, yet it’s still provides an awesome storage of  location geo-tagged data. While Malovich compares to the entire reading to an hour long movie called the “Man with a movie camera” as a project that is a brave attempt at an empirical epistemology that has only one tool: perception” I’d like to say that Google Street View has successfully achieved what Malovich has been trying to put across in the readings as well.

Anyway, check out Venessa’s blog about how the internet is making us stupid. (haha)

Check out this video.