The Roads Once Taken
Turn off the GPS. It's One More Reason Americans Don't Understand Each Other
Passing an 18-wheeler at 80 miles per hour on the interstate is not the place for Hamlet-like contemplation. But snugged back in your travel lane amidst the tailgating traffic, a thought that Shakespeare might have offered if he lived today is worth considering.
To follow your app or not to follow your app? That is the question. Whether it’s better to suffer the endless file of tractor trailers or to depart the noxious queue. To slow, no longer peering at a screen but map in hand, to stop, to see the view. If the Bard had a Benz or a Buick, who knows? Hamlet’s 21st Century soliloquy might have changed a few travel plans.
The GPS provides routes, maps tell stories. No interstate highway can offer the tales that unfold along the two lane roads running atop millennia-old trails of native Americans, or the paths of European settlers who a few hundred years ago or even less used the same wilderness tracks. A drive that follows their course presents history. Discovering the past behind the names on the map in the glove box doesn’t require a Google search. It comes with the ride.
Pick any reason you must arrive: from a business appointment to grandmother’s birthday. The technology in your hand or on the dash obviously helps you get there. What’s not to like about evading traffic jams, or making an on-time arrival? But for anyone on a journey, not a forced march, the software that assigns your way, just like the algorithms tailoring your news feed or suggesting social media “friends” you’ll never meet, has its price.
Pavlov would have recognized his lab experiment that now infuses American life. Smart phones, tablets, and watches do for humans what he did for canines. They’re the web versions of the contraption he used to drop the kibbles that conditioned his dogs. 19th Century savant or not, he could have predicted their effects as well. From TikTok addicting pre-teen minds to adult attention spans shrinking to seconds or less, research regularly reports on the damage done.
To many, asserting that one of the most widely used technologies has deliterious effects will have a Luddite ring. And with the marvels in their palms it’s easy to anticipate Americans’ groans. But the cost of globally positioning ourselves isn’t the result of the capabilities and useful conveniences of a GPS. Rather it’s the unintended consequences that are shaping how we see the world or don’t, especially on roads that aren’t its preferred way to go.
Some effects, of course, are almost too obvious to mention. Take map reading skills. Boomers had teachers who showed them to handle hard copy. Or maybe they learned helping dad navigate on the family vacation. In any case, the ability to plot a route around, say, a big city’s sprawl on a multifolded map may be rusty but it’s not foreign. For their grandchildren who at best understand geolocation as the blue dot on their iPhone screen? They might recognize a roadmap, but most likely as grandpa’s glovebox detritus or a faded decoration on his garage wall.
The lost skill is a symptom of more than geographic illiteracy. It testifies to technology’s suzerainty over our choices. Interstates, without fail the GPS default recommendation, are a case in point. Like the dog walker or stroller pusher, palm upturned and head bowed over their phone, social media scrolling and driving an interstate have alot in common. At 70 miles an hour vistas roll by like mindless posts, distant, steadily disappearing views framed by the multi-lanes and medians of the superhighway’s cordon sanitaire.
The aesthetics of the landscape aren’t the only casualty of travel in the country’s fast lanes. From Virginia where Interstate 81 traverses the verdant Shenandoah Valley to the stark beauty of Arizona’s high Sonoran Desert surrounding Interstate 19, the highways’ tempo dissuades itinerant curiosity. To be sure, some may pull over at the occasional turn-out to consider the scene. But add the on-screen kvetching as the GPS displays its recalculated arrival times after the delay. For travelers already conditioned to their devices’ beeps and buzzes, the software’s message implicitly, if unsubtly discourage exits save when the gas gauge or nature calls.
Scale up to the millions of traveling Americans following their screens at a mile-a-minute or more. The missed opportunities to learn about the places in-between are continental in scope. What’s the price? In a country marinating in media that demagogues exploit to proselytize its allegedly unprecedented grievances and divisions, it’s 50 states worth of chances to explore local histories and meet people whose lives belie the corrosive political hype.
Would a trip down a two lane road rather than a GPS recommended route make a difference in how Americans see the country and perhaps each other? Who knows? One thing is sure: staying on its chosen superhighways makes the question moot.
Whether it’s a small town in Georgia or a village in Vermont, a first hand look, not to mention a conversation at the corner store, offers Americans who choose the roads once taken the chance to learn about places, people, and the country’s shared as well as diverse history.
It also just might change how they think about the dangerous demagogery that is deepening the nation’s divisions today.
A literary infused creative Op-Ed. A timely and important read.
Speed kills. Good thing there were no Interstates when de Tocqueville wandered through the landscape.