The Street View
December 16, 2008
When I search on YouTube for an American city, there are naturally tons of hits. If Obama has ever spoken there, videos of him will appear early on the list. Various concerts come up.. as do local sporting events and shaky clips of natural disasters. But a curious genre that will also be there is the street view video. Below is an example I found for Calgary, Alberta:
The essential element of this genre is that it represents the experience of place through the windows of a car. The fact that these videos routinely get plenty of views (this one has gotten over 40,000!) is an indication of how standard the car view has become in our collective notions of place. Evidently when we imagine visiting a place what we think about is what it will be like driving through it.
Below is a video I ran into early as I got into the habit of browsing YouTube. It's a multi-part tour of Madison, Wisconsin by an Indonesian student about to return after graduating. He points out various buildings and switches from English to Indonesian at various points. Evidently his goal was to describe where he has been for the past few years to friends back home.. who he knows will have access to YouTube.
The point of interest in this video is that it has a reasonably clear audience and speaker.. and it thus contains interesting information about what is important to a particular person. But lots of these street view videos lack even this basic layer of interpreted experience.. they are simple window views.
Complementing this ubiquitous video genre is the "street view" addition to Google Maps. If you haven't seen this feature you should try it out. For many places you can not only get the standard bird's eye view of your neighborhood, but also a view that mimics what it would be like to drive down a street. At the top of this post is an image of our house taken this past fall.. and you can see that my tardy fall raking has been forever enshrined on the Internet! I could get a similar picture of any house in Appleton.
But what does this street view preference say about our perceptions of space? It seems that we have a lot of trouble thinking about vantage points for our world that are outside the windows of a car. The street is the frame of reference for place. These videos in their general lack of interpretation also point to a discomfort with thinking through what place means. Place is most definitely not something to think about.
The video below features window shots from an LA-Las Vegas car trip. The landscape is faceless and storyless. The interest is focused on the road itself.. the white lines of the pavement and the other vehicles. It's likely that the person has to concentrate on driving, I realize. But the video's emphasis on "types" of scenes encountered during this drive (which I have made plenty of times) points to the emptiness of the common experience of place.
