What do you think?
Rate this book
When Maps Become the World
Map making and, ultimately, map thinking is ubiquitous across literature, cosmology, mathematics, psychology, and genetics. We partition, summarize, organize, and clarify our world via spatialized representations. Our maps and, more generally, our representations seduce and persuade; they build and destroy. They are the ultimate record of empires and of our evolving comprehension of our world.
This book is about the promises and perils of map thinking. Maps are purpose-driven abstractions, discarding detail to highlight only particular features of a territory. By preserving certain features at the expense of others, they can be used to reinforce a privileged position.
When Maps Become the World shows us how the scientific theories, models, and concepts we use to intervene in the world function as maps, and explores the consequences of this, both good and bad. We increasingly understand the world around us in terms of models, to the extent that we often take the models for reality. Winther explains how in time, our historical representations in science, in cartography, and in our stories about ourselves replace individual memories and become dominant social narratives—they become reality, and they can remake the world.
This book is about the promises and perils of map thinking. Maps are purpose-driven abstractions, discarding detail to highlight only particular features of a territory. By preserving certain features at the expense of others, they can be used to reinforce a privileged position.
When Maps Become the World shows us how the scientific theories, models, and concepts we use to intervene in the world function as maps, and explores the consequences of this, both good and bad. We increasingly understand the world around us in terms of models, to the extent that we often take the models for reality. Winther explains how in time, our historical representations in science, in cartography, and in our stories about ourselves replace individual memories and become dominant social narratives—they become reality, and they can remake the world.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published June 29, 2020
7 people are currently reading
85 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 6, 2021
This book really pulled me in, and I chewed through it over one weekend, which is unusual for me as a slow reader. My job as a software engineer involves a lot of interrogation of the models being created from certain motives and then put to use by acting on reality in some way. I found many passages of this book to be particularly clear phrasings of concepts that I have felt to be true, but often have trouble expressing myself.
The concept of "map" is stretched very far - used as a synonym for representation, communication, lens, abstraction, etc... This is done intentionally, but it has some consequences that are mentioned in the book itself in sections on pernicious reification. In particular, by zooming so far out and by discarding subtlety, it narrows the descriptive power w.r.t. maps. The book also has significant amounts of its own cartopower - a term defined as the tendency to encourage the end-user of a map to interpret and act on some aspect of the world through the lens of the map, without necessarily being aware of the map's own biases and motives.
It was only fleetingly clear that the descriptions of high-level maps were so broad that they lacked a bit of contextual objectivity. A clear result of this is the impossibility for the sections on Assumption Archaeology to have been very specific at all. This being such a critical step to take toward becoming aware of the meaning and instrumental consequences of any particular map. Assumption archaeology (as with Nietzsche's/Foucault's concepts of genealogy upon which it is based) is an extremely high level concept which becomes meaningful in specific applications, but the process of excavating assumptions in any specific map is a challenging process to generalize. The downside of speaking so abstractly about maps is that it is harder to provide concrete steps to performing the critical task of assumption archaeology. This isn't to say that the descriptions of assumption archaeology were useless, but just that they require a separate context-specific elaboration in the areas of application.
Given the prevalence of political factors that were mentioned in the book, I kept finding myself waiting for the references to Gramsci, Lukács, Hegel, or other thinkers around the concept of ideology to pop up. If the concept of maps being politically charged is already clear to you and you would like to go deeper into how concepts seep into the world around us, you may enjoy Rehmann's Theories of Ideology, Bianchi's Gramsci's Laboratory, or Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I also think Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most interesting perspectives on the politics of our models available, despite being ostensibly narrowly focused on science.
Overall, this book made me really motivated to dive into more books, and its optimism was refreshing. The specific take-aways are a bit limited due to the high-level of abstraction that it takes, but I feel like I was assisted in noticing that because of having read the book itself, which means it has already improved my lenses to view the world from.
The concept of "map" is stretched very far - used as a synonym for representation, communication, lens, abstraction, etc... This is done intentionally, but it has some consequences that are mentioned in the book itself in sections on pernicious reification. In particular, by zooming so far out and by discarding subtlety, it narrows the descriptive power w.r.t. maps. The book also has significant amounts of its own cartopower - a term defined as the tendency to encourage the end-user of a map to interpret and act on some aspect of the world through the lens of the map, without necessarily being aware of the map's own biases and motives.
It was only fleetingly clear that the descriptions of high-level maps were so broad that they lacked a bit of contextual objectivity. A clear result of this is the impossibility for the sections on Assumption Archaeology to have been very specific at all. This being such a critical step to take toward becoming aware of the meaning and instrumental consequences of any particular map. Assumption archaeology (as with Nietzsche's/Foucault's concepts of genealogy upon which it is based) is an extremely high level concept which becomes meaningful in specific applications, but the process of excavating assumptions in any specific map is a challenging process to generalize. The downside of speaking so abstractly about maps is that it is harder to provide concrete steps to performing the critical task of assumption archaeology. This isn't to say that the descriptions of assumption archaeology were useless, but just that they require a separate context-specific elaboration in the areas of application.
Given the prevalence of political factors that were mentioned in the book, I kept finding myself waiting for the references to Gramsci, Lukács, Hegel, or other thinkers around the concept of ideology to pop up. If the concept of maps being politically charged is already clear to you and you would like to go deeper into how concepts seep into the world around us, you may enjoy Rehmann's Theories of Ideology, Bianchi's Gramsci's Laboratory, or Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I also think Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the most interesting perspectives on the politics of our models available, despite being ostensibly narrowly focused on science.
Overall, this book made me really motivated to dive into more books, and its optimism was refreshing. The specific take-aways are a bit limited due to the high-level of abstraction that it takes, but I feel like I was assisted in noticing that because of having read the book itself, which means it has already improved my lenses to view the world from.
January 28, 2021
My impression is essentially that 'When Maps Become the World' is a more entertaining, less organized, and ultimately less useful version of 'Idealization and the Aims of Science' (from a practitioner's perspective). The comparison of various 2D projections of the globe is a wonderful pedagogical example, but the rest of map <-> scientific representation analogy just felt like a sloppier version of either Potochnik or Weisberg.
The book features extensive examples of 'map thinking' from across the sciences, but it pretty quickly started to feel like things were getting called maps for the sake of calling them maps. Further, the presentations of linear regression and ANOVA both had numerous technical confusions that made me suspect the other non-philosophical material, much of which I ended up skimming. There were some high points, such as the discussions of cartopower, purpose-specificity of representations, reasoning from multiple representations simultaneously, and cognitive and social limitations of maps, but on the whole I found this uneven and think it stretched the map analogy beyond reasonable limits.
The book features extensive examples of 'map thinking' from across the sciences, but it pretty quickly started to feel like things were getting called maps for the sake of calling them maps. Further, the presentations of linear regression and ANOVA both had numerous technical confusions that made me suspect the other non-philosophical material, much of which I ended up skimming. There were some high points, such as the discussions of cartopower, purpose-specificity of representations, reasoning from multiple representations simultaneously, and cognitive and social limitations of maps, but on the whole I found this uneven and think it stretched the map analogy beyond reasonable limits.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews