I think we (speaking generally of society, particularly American society) are gravitating more and more towards visual mediums. From theater performances, to silent film, to “a television in every living room”, to web-based and then mobile media, and now with AR, VR, and immersive visual technologies – it is clear that visual experiences appeal to us.

I think what GIS does very well is that it brings together different datasets, stories, and knowledge in one layered, visual representation. And it does it in a way that centers on space. And we, as humans, exist within space, of course, so I think this kind of spatial mapping is intuitive to how we understand and process things.

And, as always, there is always the caveat in how we define things – in this case, how we define space. I think Bodenhamer puts it well when he says, “But GIS privileged quantitative data, which it required to be precise. It did not accept uncertainty or fuzziness. It also favored official representations of the world, a result that was highly problematic because this view reflected the influence of money and power.”

GIS is a representation, and representations are subjective. I think when people look at maps, they tend to accept them as “factual” documents. I worry that this mindset transfers over when people look at GIS visualizations, without taking into account that the synthesizing, organizing, and processing of the data in the backend is certainly, to some degree, opinionated.