Gardner, Google Earth
Jeff Gardner
When seeing more is less: The Hermeneutics of Google Earth, Photo Sharing and Ethical Views
of the World
Regent University
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Gardner, Google Earth
Abstract
This study explores the question of whether Google Earth’s photo share feature is narrowing our
view of the world. Paying particular attention to how Google functions as a communication
technology and it use of photography by tourists, this paper examines how, Google Earth photo
share is assuming control over both ends of the photographic hermeneutic circle, driving the
message and meaning to the passive viewer of the coastal region of Ghana, Africa.
Key words and phrases: Google Earth, Photo Share, Tourist, Photography, Photographic
Hermeneutics
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When Seeing More is Less
Most of us, with the rare exception of the nefarious few, genuinely desire deeper, more
meaningful communication and resulting human connections. We want to understand and be
understood, a beautiful exchange of sender, receiver and back again. However, forever stumbling
towards a more authentic understanding (and I dare say experience) of communication, both as
scholars and everyday folk, we often expect that communication technology will do for us what
we cannot do for ourselves - and we are just as often disappointed. This is inevitable, as
McLuhan noted, because all technology is nothing more than an extension of ourselves.
Tragically, like Narcissus, we fall in love with that extension, not as our imperfect selves, but as
an externalized, idealized, reflection of the self (McLuhan, 2013, Kindle Location 649). The
result is a repetitive cycle of emotionally driven promises, in the form of communication
technologies, through which we expect, perhaps even believe that this time, by means of this
device, we will grasp that deeper, human connection which eludes us. Regrettably this misplaced
faith in technology leaves us vulnerable to marketing campaigns created by those who produce
the technology. “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” the communication giant AT&T’s most
recognized and successful advertising campaign, was born, most do not know, from an
emotionally driven, one-sided conversation between a young woman and her deceased father as
she poured out, into a non-working phone, all the things she wished she had told him when he
was alive (Oday, 2010).
Our desire for meaning and connectivity is so omnipresent that we project it on our world
through our technology, a largely (at least as of this writing) “electronified” hermeneutic circle.
When this cycle is run ethically, both the sender and receiver infuse the exchange with meaning,
and both the sender and receiver draw value for this meaning, acknowledging the other. But what
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happens when, with the insertion of a communication technology between sender and receiver,
this relationship becomes one-sided? In the case of technologies like Google Earth and its photo
share feature, I argue that Google that has seized control of both sides of the hermeneutic cycle,
projecting assumed meaning out onto the viewer while convincingly suggesting that the world as
the technology images it, the world as it seems to Google, is the world as it is. This paper will
explore how Google Earth’s photo share feature is driving both sides of the hermeneutic cycle,
and as a result, narrowing our view of the world.
The Problem: The Photographic Hermeneutic Circle and Google
The hermeneutic circle, notably as it involves communication technology, runs deep in the
Western tradition, both in theory and practice (Copeland, 1995). Centuries before
Schleiermacher, thinkers in the West have pored over written texts, the premier communication
technology before anything electronic, trying to determine the intent of the author and the
meaning of the text (Gardner, 1993). As Gadamer noted, the text always asks questions of the
viewer (Gadamer, 2004), and the need to answer these questions is so compelling, so
omnipresent, that thinkers like Dilthey have argued that much of our happiness, indeed our very
ability to navigate existence, depends on our ability to provide answers to them (Dilthey, 1972,
p. 230). If this is true, if the hermeneutic circle compels us to find meaning when we encounter
text, is it perhaps even truer of photographic hermeneutics. Since the late twentieth century
Westerners (in particular) have conditioned themselves to learn about the past from photographs
and, even though an image can be as readily manipulated as a text, assume that if something is
pictured it must be real, it must have really happened “that way” (Sontag, 1973, p.3). This
tendency to see photographic representations of as “true” can obscure our understanding of the
subject pictured. For example, those who vacation in parts of the developing world often
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photograph areas they visit in the same terms as they encountered them in the tourist literature idealized and exotic, not poor and marginalized (Canton & Santos, 2008, p.12). This narrowed
vision makes seeing the problems and problematic places of the developing world difficult,
hampering our ability to honestly and intelligently discuss the causes of issues like global
violence and terror. But as the proverb goes, “Nemo dat quod non habet,” and we should not
expect that tourists would concern themselves with global issues while abroad, which, as we will
see in the case of Google Earth’s photo share feature, is precisely the problem.
As a theory, photographic hermeneutics alerts us to our dialogue with images, a dialogue that
has become the cultural vulgata of the twenty-first century. Photographic hermeneutics helps us
better understand that this common language of images is at play and what the conversation
means. On the other hand, as a new field, photographic hermeneutics lacks consensus of theory
about whom, or perhaps better which, is the driver in determining meaning within an image; the
sender or the receiver. But as is often the case with scholarly investigation of communication
technologies, the market runs ahead of theory. In the case of Google Earth and its photo sharing,
geo-tagging feature, the hermeneutic circle is likely being spun by the emotionally charged
rhetoric of Google sales and promotion, a process that is hijacking the whole cycle. In plainer
language, Google Earth’s photo share feature is both sending the message AND defining the
meaning for the viewer. “Explore the world from the palm of your hand..,” and “bring a world of
information alive for your students.., the possibilities are endless with your imagination!
(emphasis by Google)” reads the Google Earth tutorial (Google Earth, 2014). Words have
meaning, and Google’s hype nicely conceals that fact that the only thing that we can explore
from the palm of our hand is the devise that we are holding.
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To be fair, as a new communication technology, Google Earth does offer an array of dazzling
features and options for the armchair geographer or laptop explorer. In addition to historical recreations of civilizations and undersea exploration, Google Earth has built a street by street view
of a number of the cities in the world. These street views are mapped by a perpetually traveling
Google car (figure 1) which, equipped with a 360 degree camera on its roof, produces a static
views of streets and building which allows passive viewers, in a Sontagian-like celebration, to
take possession of any space in the world that might intrigue them (Sontag, 1977).
Figure 1. Google Street View car, Photo Credit, Google Earth
In places where the Google Street Car has not gone, notably in many parts of the developing
world, viewers can still see those places through photographs uploaded by travelers to those
areas, a process known as photo sharing and geo tagging. Using a small image organizing
program called Picasa (Picasa, 2014), travelers can upload and geo-pinpoint their photos of
anywhere in the world to the Google Earth map, creating a picture of what the area looks like as
seen through the lenses of their cameras. While the Google Street Car captures everything it
passes, travelers do not. Which raises an interesting question: how are parts of the developing
world being shown on Google Earth as photographed by those who have visited them? Since
Google Earth’s photo share creates a “see the world as a collection of random photographs from
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travelers who have seen it” type picture, how have these travelers seen it? Are they imaging what
one would really find in a given area, or are they imaging what they have come to see (or not) as
travelers, most frequently in the roll of tourist? In short, though Google Earth is making much
more of the world visible to the passive viewer, are we seeing only select portions of the world
as filtered by the tourists who collect images and supply us with the picture? This question goes
right to the heart of the hermeneutic circle and how it is consciously, or more likely,
unconsciously, pursued by the traveler capturing the image, and later, by the passive viewer
imagining the world through Google Earth.
Literature Review and Analysis
Currently I am not aware of any extant studies which deal with how Google Earth and its
photo sharing might be shaping our view of the world. There are, however, some leading works
which get at the essential components of the question: How Google as a technology operates,
how it finds, collates and presents data; what people are saying about their relationship to the
world through their use of a camera and what people are likely to photograph as they travel as
tourists in the developing world. Looking at what scholars have had to say about these pieces of
the puzzle can create a place from which we might proffer a reasoned answer to our inquiry.
John Battelle’s 2005, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business
and Transformed Our Culture, is perhaps the most informative , and revealing work concerning
what Google is and where it came from. Raised in Silicon Valley, Battelle, who was co-founder
and editor of Wired magazine (Wired, 2014), spent hours talking with Google’s founders, Larry
Page and Sergy Brin, and brings an insider’s view of Google’s origins and its functions. As
Battelle describes it, Google is, at its basic level, a program which traces, backwards, the visits
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and citations that individuals make to any given hypertext page stored on the Internet. The
program that is Google then evaluates the number of backlinks to a hypertext page and ranks the
pages in order of relevance to the question couched in a given search. For example, let’s say that
someone wanted to know what was the most influential book ever written. If they used Google
to ask this question, entering in the search box, “what is the most influential book ever written,”
they would see a list of links to the most visited hypertext pages that other people, answering the
same or similar question, have visited or cited, ranked in descending order of frequency.
However, the searcher may not know that Google’s answers are highly contextual and fluid, and
would vary over time and place. In other words, as Battelle notes, Page and Brin, the creators of
Google, assumed that the most cited answer to a given question at a given time is the correct
answer. While this is a simplified explanation of how Google work, it raises the question of how
Google is redefining what it means to ask a question and what it means to get an answer. To put
it another way, as Battelle asks, “What, in the end, might [Google] search tell us about ourselves
and the global culture we are creating together online?” (Battelle, 2005, Kindle Locations 11571159).
One of the answers to that question, as it pertains to our inquiry, is that a Google search
results “tells” (note, not “suggests”) the seeker that the collective response to their curiosity is the
correct response. This interjection of meaning by Google into the hermeneutic circle has
profound implications concerning how we see the world. True, in many quantitative matters,
such as “what is the sum of one plus one?,” a collective response of “two” is just fine. But what
of more subjective inquiries contextualized to a given place and time? What if Brin and Page
had launched their algorithmic creation in 1889 instead of 1998? What would the collective
response be to a search of “are Africans human?” Given that in 1906 the Bronx Zoo placed Ota
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Benga, a pygmy taken from the Belgian Congo, on display in its monkey house, the response to
that inquiry would have likely included the New York Time’s 1906 editorial comment of “He
(Benga) is probably enjoying himself as well as he could anywhere in his country, and it is
absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation he is suffering” (Bradford
& Blume, 1992, p. 62). Google’s “the crowd has the answer” approach to search is
Utilitarianism gorged to a global size.
To date, Google has photographed some 5 million miles of streets with its Street Car and over
10 million photographs have been posted to Google Earth’s photo share (Google, 2014). This
amount of visual information has never been collected by a communication technology in the
history of communication technologies. One might say that this is the fulfillment of McLuhan’s
concept of the “global village” (McLuhan, 2013, Kindle Location 1330), in which the world has
been compressed into a seemingly smaller community by the electric, instantaneous movement
of information from everywhere to every other place at the same time. While Battelle does not
refer to McLuhan in The Search, it certainly seems that in laying out the expansive ambitions of
Page and Brin, he may have used him as his guide.
Since Google Earth allows individuals to be part of the collective, visual definition of what a
place “is,” how are these individuals interacting with the world vis-a-vis the camera? This
question has been studied by scholars such as Sontag, Graburn and Bourdieu & Bourdieu.
According to Sontag, we use the camera as a means to take hold of the world, control it,
especially the unfamiliar or things that we sees as “the past” (Sontag, 1977, p. 9). Sontag asserts
that those cultures which have either been robbed or have robbed themselves of their past, such
as the Japanese and Americans, make for the most adamant picture takers (p. 10). While Sontag
offers no evidence for this assertion, as a professional photographer I believe she is correct when
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she says that people use the camera to capture and control, notably events that they assume will
either not come again (which, by the way, is every event) or that they insist on proving to others
(and themselves) that something really happened. Others have followed Sontag’s lead, viewing
the use of a camera as a filter with which to see portions of the world (Graburn, 1989; Milgram,
1977). But it was Sontag who put it best by noting that people tend to believe that what they see
in a photograph is the record of what took place in the past (Sontag, 1977, p. 51). A photograph
is no more an absolute record of the past than is a paragraph and an awareness of a photograph’s
limitations in meaning may well be the divide between the amateur and professional
photographer. The professional photographer purposefully plans and then creates a photograph to
explain a given concept or expressed emotion to the viewer. The amateur takes a photograph to
explain the concept back to herself or in a narrative to another. We might say that the
hermeneutic circle runs in opposite directions for professional and amateur photographers, but in
both cases, they aim at meaning by creating an image which communicates back to someone,
even if it is themselves. This is not to say that the amateur photographer is not creating meaning,
albeit hidden within their limited understanding of how to operate the camera and/or the context
of their particular cultural norms (Fraser et al., 2012, p.26). But in so far as we are concerned
with Google Earth, let us remember that, regardless of who makes the image, the viewer is often
drawn into the old trap of mistaking the image of the thing for the thing itself (Sentiles, 2010).
If anyone using a camera is trying to capture, record, and even convince themselves and
others that the thing photographed existed as shown, what specific things are tourists trying to
show us with a camera? Nearly all of the images uploaded to Google Earth’s photo share come
from tourists, so what do we know about why tourists take pictures? Sontag assumed that since
tourists are often unaccustomed to traveling to a place, they are unsure of how to respond to a
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new encounter and use a camera as a means to do something, to experience something and give
the appearance of participation (Sontag, 1977). Others have taken the notion of the tourist's
response even further and speculate that tourists use photography to reinforce social and class
roles that they carry with them to the places where they travel (Bourdieu & Bourdieu, 2004).
There is evidence for this, with some international organizations calling on professional
photographers to stop creating images that reinforce Western stereotypes of power since those
images will in turn suggest to the tourist photographer to do the same. In 2006 the Irish
Association of Non-Governmental Development Organization issued a Code of Conduct on
Images and Messages, to make this point to professional photographers, asking them to “avoid
images that potentially stereotype, sensationalize...people, situations or places” (Code of
Conduct, 2006).
In addition to theories about the use of a camera as means of cultural control, there is research
which suggests that tourists take photographs which mimic images that they see in tourist
literature. If these images reinforce stereotypes of power and control, according to theory, that’s
what the tourist will reproduce (Stylianou-Lambert, 2012). Why is this the case? Some believe
that tourists arrive at a destination wanting to capture that which is important, the essential
ingredient which show that they did something, and therefore draw on images done by
professionals which they deem to be important (Urry, 2002). As a professional photographer I
would also add that most amateurs want to take “good” pictures, starting with how they are
framed and what is in the frame. Lacking the knowledge of how to operate a camera well, most
amateurs (and beginning photography students) copy the framed image of the professional. For
the tourist, there may be an exercise of power at work in this mimicry, but it is just as likely to be
a self-initiated process of “learning from the masters” that is similar to what a first year painting
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students experiences when they are assigned the task of reproducing a famous work found in an
art gallery.
Summarizing our review of the literature, can we then assume that tourists practice mimicry in
producing the photographs that they take? I believe we can. Can we also assume that people, in
general, tend to use a camera to capture their experiences, notably with the goal of proving that
something happened, that they did something noteworthy? Again, I believe that we can. And
finally, do we know that Google Search assumes that the data (in whatever form it may be found)
which has been referenced the most is the right answer for a given search? Yes we do. How
then might this knowledge help us hazard a guess at what people are seeing when they look at
Google Earth’s photo shared images from the developing world? Since Google Earth’s photo
share is populated by tourist’s photographs, we might assume that images posted from the
developing world might look more like promotional images than images of what one might find
in that place on any given day.
To test this theory, let’s look at promotional, tourist pictures, from Accra, Ghana, in West
Africa. Having traveled and work in this city and its surrounding areas as a humanitarian
photographer, I have some first-hand, on the ground experience of what one is likely to see while
visiting the region. Listed by the World Bank as “low to middle income” for the region of West
Africa, Ghana is nonetheless ranked as the 40th poorest country in the world (World Bank,
2014). Though over the last five years Ghana has made considerable progress in education,
health, and overall life expectancy, it still suffers from extreme rural poverty, notably in the
north, with migrants often traveling to cities like Accra in search of work or relief.
The tourist website TripAdvisor.com, the 70th highest ranked website in the United States
(Alexa, 2014), selects and displays photographs from various regions of the world where one
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might travel, including Accra (TripAdvisor.com, 2014). Concerning Accra, TripAdvisor.com
showcases a number of photographs to promote the city as a travel destination. On the
TripAdvisor’s “Accra, Ghana” page (see here - http://www.tripadvisor.com/Tourism-g293797Accra_Greater_Accra-Vacations.html), under the “All traveler photos” button and in the “candid
travelers photo” feature on the right-center portion of the screen, visitors to TripAdvisor.com
will find (at the time of this writing) 1188 posted images of the area in and around Accra, Ghana.
Of all the images featured, less than ten give any hint of the massive crowding and poverty that
is found everywhere in Accra. In all of the 1188 photos posted, there is not a single image of
anyone begging on the streets of Accra, a common sight throughout the city. Instead, in the 1188
photographs one finds (in order of frequency) scenes of beaches, food and drink, assorted selfies
and happy locals either playing music or selling craft goods. No posted images hint at the
poverty of Accra, or the existence of areas like Agbogbloshie, the world’s largest e-waste dump
(figures 1 and 2). Sprawling for over 4 acres, Agbogbloshie is home to some 40,000 Ghanaians,
who packed into slums like Old Fadama, live, quite literally, on top of older sections of the dump
that are full and covered over with dirt (Agbogbloshie, 2014). Owing to its size and smell,
Agbogbloshie is difficult to miss as part of the coastal area of the city.
It is not surprising that TripAdvisor.com would filter out any submitted images that picture
Agbogbloshie, Old Fadama or cast Accra and its surrounding areas in a poor light.
TripAdvisor.com is, after all, a tourism company which makes its living by promoting all things
fun and exotic. But how do the images of Accra from the travel industry compare to the images
of the same area posted by tourists on Google Earth’s photo share? Examining the images
uploaded within the Ring Road, a heavily traveled highway which forms the boundary between
Accra and surrounding areas, we find that of the roughly 250 images posted through Google
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Earth’s photo share, at the time of this writing, there is only one of Agbogbloshie, placed there
by Jack Caravanos, an Associate Professor of Environmental Health at
Figure 1. Street scene, Old Fadama near Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana. © Jeff Gardner, 2012
the City University of New York School of Public Health (figure 3). Professor Caravanos travels
the world investigating toxic waste sites and is not a tourist. Of the remaining 250 plus images,
the most frequent scene featured is that of a beach (figure 4), imaged in a strikingly similar
manner to those found on TripAdvisor.com.
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Figure 2. An alley in Old Fadama, Accra, Ghana. © Jeff Gardner, 2012
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Figure 3. Agbogbloshie e-waste dump, Accra, Ghana. Photo credit Jack Caravanos
Figure 4. Beach near Accra, Ghana. Photo credit Alexurs
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Analysis and Conclusion
What then can we conclude, at least by way of educated speculation, concerning the Google
Earth’s photo share and a narrowing view of the world? First, I believe that we can concluded
that Google Earth, as an extension of Google Search, is controlling the message and meaning of
the images feature on its photo share pages. Is Google doing this with intent, that is, is it actively
manipulating the photographic hermeneutic cycle? Although I am not yet comfortable with such
a conclusion, largely due to the need for further research, producers and promoters of new
technologies often assume the role of driver and definer of what their product “means,” like
circus barkers who are also the performers.
Concerning people and their cameras, we can conclude that they use them to filter the
received meaning of a scene, transforming a three dimensional experiences into a twodimensional objects that are easier to control. As tourists, they tend to do this as mimicry of
images that they have already been shown by the travel industry, an industry which is interested
in certain views with assigned meanings such as “fun,” “sexy” or “exotic.” When we combined
our understanding of how tourists use cameras with Google’s operative assumption that the most
cited (or imaged) data (or pictures) is the correct answer (or image) to a query of “what is this
like,” we can summarize that Google Earth’s photo share is showing the passive viewer more of
less of the world, a narrowing of the hermeneutic cycle. Whether Google intends to do this is
beside the point - by withholding information (images) Google is redefining what the full
meaning of an imaged place and its people are, or it last ought to be seen.
One final point deserves mentioning. This analysis of Google Earth’s photo share is not meant
to suggest that as a communication technology Google is “bad” or “good,” especially in a
moralistic sense. As a communication technology, even given its historical size and secretive
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practices, Google is not a foreign entity - it is us. Google works the way that it does because
people willing accept the proposition that the collective answer (meaning) is the right answer
(meaning). Coming full circle, we should remember McLuhan warning that “All media works us
over completely” (McLuhan, 1966, p.3). In the case of Google Earth and photo share, we ought
to note that we are the media, and therefore we are the ones we have been warned about.
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