subject: Have you ever been to Greenland? [print this page] Have you ever been to Greenland? Have you ever been to Greenland?
I'm working on a new project that uses google maps. The more I look at the map, the more something seems really odd about it.
Because the world is round and maps are typically flat and rectangular, cartographers use a magic formula to represent 3d reality on a 2d page (or screen). The trouble is, it's not magic enough. Do you realise the map we're used to seeing all over the place is hugely distorted?
Africa, for example, appears to be roughly the same size as Greenland. In fact, Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland. Ooops!
South America appears roughly the same size as Europe but South America is actually double the size of Europe. India appears roughly the same size as Scandinavia but India is actually three times the size of Scandinavia. Ooops and ooops again!
From school books to newspaper articles, I've seen this bold representation of what our world looks like thousands of times and it's a mathematical illusion. It's also politically sensitive. Many rich white countries are shown bigger than they really are while many poverty-stricken countries are reduced to a fraction of their true size.
As Count Alfred Korzypski said in 1931: the map is not the territory. Too right it's not!
And yet what a useful concept.
I think we're all a bit like cartographers really. We can't possibly represent the whole world inside our small heads, so we create a kind of internal map. And, like cartographers, our maps of the world are necessarily distorted. We delete some bits and generalise others. We focus tremendous attention on a few things and dismiss many other things as unimportant.
That's why I think the best kind of therapeutic changework happens when you rearrange "reality tunnels". When I work with clients, I carefully and deliberately distort their internal maps to emphasise the beliefs and values that are going to be most useful for them to get where they want to be.
When I consult for political campaigns, we utilise similar principles. In essence: you change reality by changing people's representations of reality. It's all about what you get people to focus on and what patterns you can build between their representations.
That's why it bothers me that Africa is shown on the map so much smaller than it really is. For every one person living in Greenland, there are 1,500 living in Africa many of them without clean water. Don't they at least deserve to be represented on the map fairly?
Here's an alternative map known as The Peter's Projection. It was unveiled by Arno Peters in 1973 and he described it as "an area accurate map".
