Most issues boil down to a simple number of questions:

  • what’s the problem?
  • what’s at stake for the various sides arguing about it?
  • is any given outcome likely to be seen by all concerned as both fair (enough) and sustainable?

And above all:

  • who decides?

Many key international disputes (Israel/Palestine, Kashmir, Kosovo and so on) are about land: who lives on it, who has the best claim to live on it, where does one claim stops and someone else’s claim start, etc. And, above all: who decides?

At the Dayton peace negotiations for Bosnia in 1995, the Bosnian participants were all mightily impressed by American computerised animation sequences which allowed them to zoom up and down and over the valleys and uplands of Bosnia in vivid detail. For the first time ever Bosnian leaders could see what sort of land lay where, which helped them work out new internal administrative and other boundaries. The local issues at stake (some of which had been feuded about for centuries) could literally be seen in a completely new way.

Which brings us to Google Maps, and the way that being able to see and present geographical issues in a new way both helps solve problems – and generates new ones.

Not least because the core question – who decides? – now can drift away from leaders sitting in a smoke-filled room haggling over topographical detail to the world’s masses, who may turn out to have some strong views on what belongs to whom – and how places are named:

What results is an irony. The digital culture that encourages the inclusion of multiple names for a single feature on a map is the same digital culture that has encouraged hundreds of thousands of Iranians to voice their discontent. The very medium incites nationalism, yet also frustrates it.

It all points back to a simple question: What is Google? Is it a repository for all of our mutually exclusive claims, or is it a higher power to which we appeal? It cannot be both, and yet we seem to treat it as both.

This tension may only heighten going forward. “In a world where mapmaking is cheap and anyone can do it,” Goodchild says, “you would eventually expect things to become more and more local.” In such a future, either we will reconcile ourselves to the lack of a central arbiter, or the conflicts will be all over the map. 

Better? Worse? Just … different? 

At the least more democratic, therefore more confusing – and perhaps potentially more turbulent?