Society 2.0 — Up is Down
Society 2.0 — Chapter 2 — Challenging Our Assumptions
There is no good reason why our maps don’t look like this:
There’s also no reason that we don’t select the image below, the way I have oriented it, when we want to display an image of the Earth:
Let’s not get caught up in arguing about maps, because this isn’t an article about map making. Yes there are a lot of explanations on why we look at the world the way we do, and there are a lot of events that led up to the decision to orient our maps the way we do.
The important takeaway I’m trying to get across is that these were all arbitrary decisions. There is no underpinning logic to dictate why our maps must be oriented the way they are. Someone at some time made an arbitrary decision. And that decision became popular and carried itself forward through tradition.
And now we find ourselves in a world where North is considered up, and South is considered down. And these arbitrary considerations further dictate how we…
