Spatial Awareness: Are Smartphones Making Us Dumb?

I recently spent six days in Napa, Sonoma, then the city of San Francisco with the lovely Aenea as well as another couple we brought along. As much fun as traveling with others can be, this trip really brought out some annoying personality ticks among all involved. I'm not saying I'm without sin in this department, but I was reigning it in, if my friends ever see me unleashed it may the end of the friendship.

Where to start? It's the male of the other couple and his addiction to GPS. He's a smart guy, does IT work for a large local company, and I knew this going in. Most of the time we can't simply go out to eat that he doesn't program the destination into his tedious fucking Mercedes GPS system. Don't get me wrong, I like GPS, I made sure he was taking his Garmin before we flew out, but it has it's place! The two days in wine country were fine, we had a driver, and my rudimentary knowledge of the area kept him at bay. It was the city that brought it all to a head.

We had explained going in that San Francisco is not a city you drive in. Once we got there I made sure to hit some of the hills on Lombard Street to hammer home the point, then in an unbelievable stroke of luck we get parking near Coit Tower. This came back to bite me, as I spent the next hour explaining to him that no, that was an abberation, hell the places we're going to go don't have fucking parking lots like back home! Okay, tangent...

I have a cousin that lives in San Francisco, and has lived in the Bay Area for 15 years. She had a local place picked out for us that night, but Mr. IT guy was just aghast that the place didn't even have a functioning website. "They probably don't need one." I say. He rolls his eyes and calls them to make sure they're open. Yes, he is basically questioning the reservations that my cousin ( a fucking local )has made at her favorite restaurant. How was the place? Awesome, my friends couldn't stop talking about it. I didn't gloat.

Okay back to the GPS. I'm determined to keep us out of the fucking car, and I rouse the wife early to get out and get the transit passes. We'd already ridden the cable cars, lattes in hand before the other two had gotten out of bed. I gave consideration to exploring the city without them.

No decision can be made without digging up the iPhone and standing there like a moron while it plots your course. Then it's judgment is unquestionable. What really sunk it home was when we were looking for one certain store, we'd looked up the address, and were walking down Hayes Street and when we get 'there' the store isn't there.

"This is it..." he says staring blankly across the street.

"It's down the street" says Aenea, and starts walking.

"You found it? You brought it up on your phone?"

"No" she says, "This is the 300 block, that's the 400 block, and it's down there, at 536 Hayes." Then the starts walking again for effect.

At another point on the way back, he remarks that he doesn't even know which way the hotel is, at which my wife and I both point to the northwest, "It's that way, let's get a cab."

He's a smart guy, I genuinely like him, but seeing this display did cause me to lose some respect for him. I can't stand not knowing where I am, I even caught myself comparing the shadows to the time of day once in SF, just to get my bearings. I'm the rube, yet I was the one who could navigate a major American city!

Anyways, TLDR

I am sorry you are bothered this much by what happened.

yeah really..... not much of a friend if you're that easily annoyed by others.

I'd have fun with it. Ribbing him on using tech and still getting it wrong.

You should probably kill him so you will feel better.

I'd be amused, mostly, and just roll my eyes on the dependence even when all that's needed is a little common sense. Stories like this make it easy to believe other stories about people driving out into the middle of no where and getting lost because the roads aren't actually there, or the "road" is actually a couple of ruts in a muddy field someplace.

run him over with the tractor and then feed his carcass to the pigs......

Vaguely similar story: Dad went flying to a conference with his boss in his boss's personal Beechcraft. As I may have mentioned () Dad was a vastly experienced pilot with decades of puttering around the east coast. His boss was an old fart with too much money who wanted a plane and could barely fly it. The boss flew, btw, and Dad suffered the indignity of passengerhood.

On the way home, the boss says, like he's doing Dad a favor, "take the controls while I plot our heading." The boss takes out all his flight computer crap and maps and charts and sets to work. Dad looks at the landmarks and the compass and points the plane in the direction he knows NJ is. After 10 minutes, the boss proudly comes up with a heading and tells Dad. Yeah. You guessed it.

Not really. I was interested, because it's something I think about every time I see a teen hunched over a text and wonder if they ever really see anything that's going on around them. Your friend sounds like the adult version.

On the one hand, I love Google maps and, particularly with restaurants, I'll check the menu online ahead of time if there is one (I'm notoriously poky at deciding what I want, so to spare the others at the table, I'll try to narrow my choices down at least a little before we get there).

On the other hand, one of the reasons I tend to use my phone sparingly, and NOT for directions (or games or pretty much of anything except to make calls and text), is because I want to see what's going on around me. What's the point of travel if you're staring at a tiny screen all the time?

However, there are people who have absolutely no sense of direction. Once upon a time before smartphones, I got a call from a young friend who was on the way to a job interview in Manhattan. Now, granted, she'd grown up in the suburbs, but it's Manhattan. Streets and avenues are numbered, and all you really have to remember is that Fifth Avenue is the dividing line between East and West.

So I get this call. "I'm lost. I got off the subway and I'm all turned around. I'm trying to get to 17th Street and Seventh."

Me: "Where are you now?"

She: "23rd and Fifth."



Then again, once upon a time my kids and I were on an expedition to South Street, and we needed to get back to the Staten Island Ferry. Daughter was about 10, son was about 7, and they were hot and tired and sniping at each other. Daughter was doing that I'm-older-so-I-know-everything number. Best way to put the kibosh on that was to give Son something to do that he was better at, and he had an uncanny sense of direction. Challenged him to find the way from South Street to the ferry, through the maze of pre-Colonial Wall Street, without any help.

He literally - city-raised kid - squinted up at the sun, thought for a minute, and said, "Okay, it's afternoon. Sun's over there, so that's west. We want to go south. It's this way."

Straight as an arrow, got us to the ferry terminal. Shut Daughter up for the rest of the afternoon...a major accomplishment in and of itself.

So maybe your friend really does have a lousy sense of direction, or maybe he's just showing off a new toy, and the next time you meet up he'll have developed a newer, even more annoying behavior.

Typing that screed was venting. We may be taking a six hour round trip road trip next weekend.

And it's deep into the backwoods of Southeastern Oklahoma.

Is apostle's wife hot?

Yes, my wife is hot.

This is why I don't use GPS when driving my bus.

At most, I may plug addresses into Google Maps beforehand if I have my laptop with me when mapping, but then it's all by memory and knowledge of the Portland street system.

"Dumb" is not the word I would have chosen.

My son is organizing a trip to Chattanooga and other places in the Southern Appalachans. He's using a.....GASP!.....road atlas. And nobody in the group has a GPS because everyone can read a map and they have directions written out in advance too. A chip off the old block!

Old people.

When I visited San Francisco, my friend pulled out a paper map, we hopped on the correct cable car, and we were exactly where we needed to be. We did pull out my GPS at one point to double-check that we were in the right direction, but it didn't get any signal.

Science!

Geez. When the wife and I were in SanFran a couple years ago, I thought I had never been in a city so easy to find my way around in . . .

I will admit I cannot navigate without either an actual map (drawn is fine, nothing fancy) or written notes about landmarks or street names, etc. since my memory is toast. In other words, if I go into an unfamiliar area I cannot reverse everything and head out the way I came from memory.

As long as I can write or draw as I go, I'm fine, but I will have to refer to my notes constantly.

There's some fancy psychiatric term for the way my brain is wired, but I can't recall it. It's in my VA disability paperwork.

Anne puts in the GPS for EVERYTHING. Even in a city where she has spent most of her life and except for one area IS ON A FREAKIN CARDINAL GRID, with numerated street names! Take the GPS away (like when we would visit and use her brother's car which didn't have a working outlet) and we got around just fine. She says it's just for the traffic info, but I think it's kinda mental. It's especially annoying when we are running late and she has program in the address before we can pull out of the driveway (she is OCD, so there is about a minute/2 minute ritual of things that have to be done before you can put the car in gear).

I don't really drive, and just got a phone with GPS (she has the Garmin) so just started using it. Generally I just go the direction I think I should go and in route pick up landmarks to further direct me. I have pretty good luck with that method. When walking/taking transit around Seattle though, I'm getting pretty good. Directions are pretty easy, but in the immediate downtown area the different plattings really fuck up the normal grid (which extends throughout the county) which is taking me a bit to get used to.

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I wonder if there's been any research done for gamers - we know tons of maps and landscapes. For example, anyone who's played the Assassins Creed series probably knows all those maps like the back of their hand, and they're modeled to be almost identical to real cities.
I wonder if spotting landmarks in realistic-looking games also has any correlation to real-life orientation skills...

I'll never forget getting directions to a coworker's wedding many years ago: "get off at exit 149 and turn left at the light. Then turn right, left after two blocks, then right..." In other words, no street names or landmarks. Not even the name or address of the church. I got so completely fucking lost that when, after an hour, I happened upon the Garden State parkway, I got on it and went the fuck home.

Heh. 95% of the directions we give and receive at work revolve around landmarks that are no longer there or homesteads. "Turn left where the Rock House used to be..." "Turn right at the end of Tommy Smith's fence."

What's really fun are the unimproved roads. We have a couple of areas out in our PJ that are entirely dirt roads. They're all intertwined and interconnected with old dirt trails that date back from when the first European settlers moved in. For instance, about five miles from my house, I can hit a dirt road, and since I'm familiar with the routes, I can drive to the next town over, 20 miles away and never have my tires touch pavement.

Dispatcher: "Be 10-84 to 123 XYZ Road in reference to a 10-96."
Me: "Umm... Central, can you give me a cross?"
Dispatcher: "Ermm... Yeah. Co. Rd. 1148".
Me: *thinks* "Oh, the old logging trail. 10-4."

It was too hard for him to buy a city map, hilight the route, make copies and mail it out... or at least get street names off it.

I do know that there's a hand-in-glove relationship between gaming companies and the military. The Last Starfighter isn't just fiction.

ETA: Here's the link I was looking for:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/arts/23thom.html?pagewanted=all

I hate when people try to give me directions like that.

"Just give me the STREET ADDRESS and I'll find it MYSELF on my MAP!"

I wonder if that's a Jersey thing? I've got a slew of cousins all over North Jersey, and they all give directions like that.

We won't even get into the turnpike signage in that part of the world.

"Ya can't get there from here."

I swear to god, we were once given "turn left at the cows" as directions to find a house up in the old farm areas in northwest Jersey. Sure enough, they were there.