Course Project: Google Earth Community

 

About Me:

 

My name is Muzammil Hussain, and I'm a Journalism and Mass Communication student in my final year here at the UW.

 

 

Why I'm taking this class:

 

As a graduating senior, I wanted to take a fun course where I could also learn something about something I've always been interested in: technology and society. When I saw the course listing, I realized that this might be a perfect course to get at this new form of communication and learning that has become very much integrated into our everyday lives. Over the past semester, I've really enjoyed what I've been reading and learning, and I hope you find what I'm about to share with you about the Google Earth Community as interesting and fun as I've found it.

 

extra extra:

 

Interesting lecture on flash mobs and online mobilizing by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society:

 

 

Practicum Project:

 

What is Google Earth:

 

Google Earth is an online application produced by Google (download here for free). When it was first released, it was essentially a virtual globe that users could zoom in and out of to view parts of the world that were mapped with real photographs of rural landscapes and urban areas. From personal experience, I recall Google Earth entering popular culture as far back as two years ago when the product experienced increased use by the general public to view famous landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the stadium at New Orleans when the hurricane hit, Washington DC, and parts of China. Today, the product is much richer and complicated, with 3D visualizations of buildings, and overlapped with different forms of Web data such as Wikipedia, flickr photos, and more.

 

 

Where does "Google Earth Community" come in:

 

Google Earth Community comes in when you think about the labor that goes behind this data-rich technology. Basically, for being a free service, there are costs and benefits and it'd be hard to imagine that such an interesting product came to be for completely free. The way that I've begun to understand Google Earth Community through this semester long ethnographic observation and participation is that Google Earth Community members, who come from all over the world, are largely responsible for categorizing and organizing the data and making Google Earth more than just something to sit and watch buildings. Google Earth Community members are the hidden labor behind Google Earth that exemplifies the essence of Web2.0 participatory and collaborative culture.

 

Field Work Journal:

 

 

Entry 1: Exploring the Community (February 18th, 2008 -- 3 hours)

 

Not having any idea what Google Earth Community was, I first visited Google's Google Earth page to download the software. Apparently, the software wasn't available for Mac until recently, which was a relief because I own a MacBook and didn't want to go through the extra hassle of finding a PC... So, I spent about an hour browsing through the world, zooming in and out, using the search function to find places I've visited in India, the US, Malaysia and more. It's quite addicting and I didn't realize that an hour had passed so quickly.

 

 

Remembering that I was supposed to be actually looking into the Google Earth Community, I realized that I was missing the point by just browsing Google Earth aimlessly. To join Google Earth Community, it's actually a very simple process. It's like registering for an email, but the cool thing is that because you're going to be a member of a community, you are encouraged to have a profile, and your activities are logged to showcase how much of a committed member you are. The community has also organized itself in a very user friendly way in that the members can visit 'news' and 'FAQ' pages to see what is happening in the community, what topics have been popular recently, which members have been online recently, what they've been contributing to, etc.

 

 

Entry 2: Case Study A: Sunken Ships (March 3rd, 2008 -- 3 hours)

 

I spent hours browsing through a forum on Google Earth Community on finding and tagging the locations of famous war ships and sunken ships. The sheer amount of people working on this, and what they've been able to collect is amazing. What they seem to do is locate all the ships they're aware of from outside sources, and tag the last known location of the ships along with photos of the wreckage if they have it. The collaborative nature of this project is awesome, because if any one person or company tried to do it, the costs and time necessary would be much more. By having this open and collaborative forum, Google is able to aggregate all the data known to the public (experts in the topic as well as non-experts) and aggregate it in limited time and for free.

 

 

Entry 3: Case Study B: Prisons Around the World (March 17th, 2008 -- 3 hours)

 

This week I explored a community forum dedicated to place-marking all the prisons in the world. Much like the sunken ships project, this was a collaborative effort from all the people around the world to tag all known prisons visible in Google Earth. However, what makes this drastically different is the emotional and political resonance it seems to have with the people involved in this project. For example, I was looking at New Zealand place-marks of prisons, and was very disturbed. What has been stereotyped in my mind as a serene and beautifully innocent nation is actually littered with high-security prisons (tons, and tons of them).

 

 

Knowing that 2.2 million people in the United States are incarcerated, I was personally disturbed to see the hundreds of place-marks around the world that showcase the places where we imprison human beings. Apparently, I am not alone. As the post below showcases, this emotional disturbance leads to bouts of creativity and self-expression in Google Earth Communities. These forms of creativity definitely make a statement, and probably influence and shape the goals and values of behind collaborative projects like these. From a personal standpoint, just exploring this community has heightened my awareness and concern for the issue of the prison industrial complex.

 

 

Entry 4: Case Study C: Iraq War, Palestine and Politics (March 31st, 2008 -- 3 hours)

 

While I was doing fieldwork today, something that caught my attention was discussions related to politics. Two forums were created (one related to Palestine, and the other related to the US war in Iraq) where citizens from around the world were engaged in lively, and sometimes uncivil dialogues about issues of identity, sense of place, and the politics behind it all. These examples highlight how the Google Earth Community does have an inherent power hierarchy that maintains order as much as it can, but sometimes does exhibit the biases of the human beings behind this technology.

 

The first thing I'll showcase is the discussion on a newbie poster's place-mark of US solders' war crimes in Iraq:

 

 

This post is interesting because a poster named George6 posted a place-mark of a city in Iraq where 3 US Marines were arrested for murder. George6 seems to just leave it at that, and the place-mark had gained 157 downloads at that time. This is actually a very interesting phenomenon because up until now all American citizens know about the Iraq War is through traditional elite news sources, but here everyday people are taking that information and presenting it in new and more powerful ways that might impact how we think about our foreign policy.

 

The second example is a showcase of how, despite Google Earth Community's definition of community members as members of the online community, all people come from a place, time, and historical context thad defines who they are, where they come from.

 

 

This forum post tells the story of a heated debate that occurred between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli voices when people were struggling to name places in the occupied territories. According to the pro-Palestinians, their grievance was the attempted cleansing of their identities online by pro-Israelis who were trying to rename villages and historical landmarks on Google Earth. This is a great example of how a real-life debate (and in fact, physical struggle) can manifest itself in online forums. It is also an example where "Master Guides" such as esterrett must practice their best judgement in a way that holds the community together, while also not disregarding issues that are so central to people in real-life.

 

Entry 5: Conclusions and Questions (April 14th, 2008 -- 3 hours)

 

For the last slot of fieldwork time that I've scheduled, I wanted to participate rather than just be an observer. The first thing I wanted to do was ask members how to get involved, so I made posts (as I had done before) but ask specifically what the best way for a newbie (or in Google Earth Community terms "Tourist") to start contributing. I thought the most logical thing was to just ask on one of the forums, in this case the sunken ships page, that I was interested but did not know how to contribute. Moments after I'd posted, I received a reply that I should first look at topics that interest me, and search for them through the 'main page' or the google-powered search bar. The second piece of advice I received was to visit and review the FAQ pages to not ask redundant questions. I also noticed that the people responding to my query were "Master Guides" or the experts who are very involved in the community.

 

 

After reading the FAQs I found that making place-marks is very easy and user friendly. All you have to do is click on the place-mark tool while running Google Earth, zoom in and place the pin on the location you're trying to define, and edit the information. I pinned my house in Cleveland, added photos of our backyard (which I deleted, because I thought it was kind of creepy to have my back yard on the internet). I made a forum to talk about Cleveland, posted my place-mark and then talked to some people from Cleveland about growing up there. It was fun!

 

 

Lastly, I've been thinking about the Rheingold discussion on the three categories of media spaces, and where Google Earth might fit in. I don't think any of them fully capture what Google Earth is. I do think, however, that it has to be a combination of his two categories: virtual reality and responsive environments. I say this because it is virtual in the sense that it is a replication of the real world completely virtually online, but also a responsive environment because users can and do create this environment to 'correspond' to the reality that they are replicating. For example, people add and link photos form vacations to far away places they've visited, and in that sense there is nothing un-real about it because it connects direct experiences in a virtually replicated space. Basically, even though this is a virtual 'world' in every sense, it would not exist without the original spaces, places, and people it is mirroring.