点击每期节目
可以看到具体文稿内容
Are GPS Apps Messing With Our Brains?
Something to think about as you hit the road for the holidays.
By Måns Swanberg
About 15 years ago, anthropologist Claudio Aporta and philosopher Eric Higgs traveled to Igloolik, a remote island in far northeast Canada, to answer an intriguing question: How might newly introduced GPS devices affect the island's Inuit hunters, who possessed some of the sharpest wayfinding skills on Earth?
You don't want to get lost on Igloolik. The proximity of magnetic north makes compasses fickle. The land can appear utterly featureless, especially in winter, when the cold—like a cat watching a mouse, "waiting patiently to see if he would make a mistake," as explorer R.M. Patterson once put it—can make the smallest mishap fatal. During the summer, when Inuit hunters stalk walrus by boat, sea fog can close so tight around a vessel that anyone lacking GPS must drop anchor, lest they run aground, or steer out to sea and risk running out of fuel.
To navigate this murk, Igloolik's hunters had long attended closely to not just stars and landmarks, but patterns of wind, snowdrift, current, animal behavior, and light. They read as much in the wind's snow sculptures as Polynesian sailors read in constellations and tides. They had no formal training and rarely used paper maps. Yet the best hunters carried in their heads extraordinarily intricate maps of the landscape, constructed through decades of experience and tutelage. During a break in travel, a veteran hunter might ask novices to describe the location of a place, and nudge his protégés along as they worked out the problem aloud. This was easier when the Inuit traveled by dogsled—no engine noise—but it still happens in the snow-machine age.
Like the snowmobile, GPS offered the hunters irresistible advantages. They could travel more safely through terrestrial whiteouts or ocean fog. If a snowmobile conked out or a hunting party had to stash food or equipment, GPS made it easy to mark the spot and find it later. And the hunters always knew the way home. But within a few short years, as Aporta and Higgs documented, the GPS units revealed some sharp limitations. In winter, the batteries quickly failed unless the devices were kept against the body under much clothing. The units themselves were devilishly hard to operate with gloves or mittens, and their screens iced over in seconds.
968重庆之声
每周一至周五8点56分
每天三分钟
养成良好英语听说习惯
