Once upon a time, getting lost could also mean discovering something: an unknown restaurant, an alley that did not appear on the maps, a detour that became a memory. Today, when glasses like Meta's Ray-Ban Display promise to show us the direction directly on the lenses, the possibility of getting lost has almost become extinct, replaced by the voice of the navigator that corrects, anticipates, and optimizes every movement.
All thanks to a technology that we only remember when it doesn't "work": GPS. Born in the 1970s as a military tool, the Global Positioning System became a civilian infrastructure in 2000, when the United States liberalized its signal. From that moment, and then with the advent of smartphones from the 2010s, digital navigation, or the combined use of geolocation, digital cartography and route guidance, has entered every pocket. Twenty-five years later, Google Maps has exceeded ten billion downloads on Android devices alone and has one billion active users monthly. In addition to knowing where we are, we know where to go at any time, when and where, and our relationship with space has completely transformed.
Research by the Politecnico di Milano shows how connectivity is shifting travel planning from before to during: mobility is no longer planned in advance, but modelled in real time, based on data that changes from moment to moment. The Eurispes Tourism 4.0 report (November 2024) estimated that, worldwide, over 50% of travellers entrust their choices to algorithm recommendations, which read the flow of vehicles in real time, redistribute road loads and report nearby attractions and experiences. According to David Metz of University College London, however, this "increased capacity" of the network has made transport systems more efficient, but also more predictable.
What happens then to our perception of space with the mediation of digital platforms? When the navigator indicates the direction, in essence, the brain stops building an internal map: we know where to go, but no longer where we are and above all how to do it. Greater efficiency is mirrored by a cognitive impoverishment that is transmitted generationally.
Younger people, who have grown up with smartphones in their pockets, see their spatial memory and movement planning capacity reduced, developing lower orientation skills than their parents and grandparents. These are the conclusions of Hugo Spiers of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, according to which the constant use of navigation systems reduces the activity of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, the areas responsible for spatial memory and planning.
The implications are not only physiological, but also social and relational. A study by the Boku University of Vienna published in Nature shows that geolocation systems and navigation apps are gradually "reshaping people's interaction with natural environments", replacing what was once physical knowledge of places with an interface that tends to filter and standardize the experience, compressing the perceptual variety and standardizing the trajectories.
After all, Google has effectively replaced the role of traditional cartography, just as Google Books has become the world's largest library and Google Art Project the largest catalogue of works of art ever. A gradual conquest, emulated by social media such as TikTok and soon perhaps by ChatGPT and other LLMs, "based on the sensorimotor appropriation of reality, on its datification, and on its immediate representability", in the words of the semiologist Ruggero Eugeni (Nella rete di Google, Franco Angeli, 2017). In this, the map, in its cross-platform digital form, is no longer a neutral tool, but a cognitive environment that includes, interprets, and recommends, shaping how we perceive the territory and how we choose to move.
Every search, every check-in, every movement leaves a trace that feeds algorithms and business models. Collecting fragments of our mobility means improving services, as smart cities propose to do with their sensors and tracking. At the same time, however, it implies building increasingly complete profiles of who we are and where we want to go, with non-trivial consequences for privacy. A case that touches many closely is the recently activated Instagram Maps function, which allows you to share your location in real time with your contacts: a gesture that simplifies meetings but, as the New York Times has pointed out, redraws the boundaries between sharing and surveillance.
Meanwhile, technology continues to advance. Digital maps introduce suggested routes differentiated by means of transport, such as bicycles, and special needs, such as reducing environmental impact. Smart glasses bring the navigator directly to the lenses, with no more barriers between virtual and real. Thus the boundary between body, space and information is further reduced. The anthropologist Marc Augé defined "non-places" as spaces without identity and history, crossed without being truly lived. The risk is that digital navigation will make more and more cities, neighbourhoods, and landscapes into non-places, crossed by citizens who are more or less unaware and increasingly comparable to datasets.