Cross-Country In the Darkness of Unsearchable Cities

I'm iced in at a Pennsylvania hotel room on the sixth day of my solo drive from Los Angeles to New Jersey, with three days spent in Houston along the way. I've been navigating with hand-transcribed MapQuest directions and a road atlas. It feels terrible that I don't know more about the places I'm traveling through. This sliver of time before ubiquitous GPS and web-access in vehicles along with better searchable cities and local search platforms is making the world feel pretty dark to me (as in unmapped). We really need to light things up by paving the world with site-specific information and making it accessible through mobile devices. Public authorship will be a socio-geographic light bulb when the next Edison steps up to the plate. We'll wonder how we ever lived without it.

I have a friend who's very into the future of mobility. He told me he used to get furious while sitting at stop lights when no one was coming the other way. (Why did he have to wait for no one? Where was the background intelligence?) Now I'm starting to get a little miffed when I can't find out where I am, what's around me, and what tends to happen there.

Knowing the name of where we are is not knowing where we are. *cough* There are whole new worlds in this world waiting to be seen once we get serious about digitally representing and contextualizing the history, state and reported experiences of the physical spaces we navigate. Social software meet Searchable Cities? I hope so sooner than later.