The Glorious Strip

View The Strip in a larger map

Above is my map of The Las Vegas Strip. I made this using Google Maps and tried to include most of the major hotels and casinos. My map could of course be wrong, as maps are constantly being updated ll the time. For example, I was forced to use Google Maps, and it said that there was a hotel and casino where there wasn't one. It had been destroyed 2 years prior, yet Google had not updated it. As it stands now, it is just an empty lot, but to many people who will go and look at a Google Map of The Strip, they will see the hotel that is no longer there. Nowadays anyone can create a map using a toolkit. I feel that this means that people will tend to not get lost as often. This new type of geography let's anyone control how they want to view their maps, and reduces the potential of people getting lost. However this is not always the case, as my good friend Anooj found out. I gave him a printout of google map directions to get to our campsite that we were going to, however Anooj looked the directions over and took off. Needless to say I get a call an hour later saying that he is lost, so I pull out the trusty old Thomas Guide and get him going in the right direction. These new maps help people get to where they are going, but not understand why they have to take this highway or do this turn. These new maps give people a false sense of hope in thinking that they know where they are going, when this is not always the case. If people do not have a map which they can translate to their mental maps, they can easily get lost. Many times when you printout a map from google maps, you are able to adjust how big you wnat the map to be, but when someone else gives you a map prinout, it could be confusing ot knowing where you are going.

On the other hand, we have such great acess to maps, that anyone can print one out to the size of their liking. I know some of us have those great old maps that fold out to size of the car to help you get where your going, but sometimes we don't need something that big. This is where we adjust the size and make the map to our liking to help us get where we are going. These new maps help us express where we are going and how we are going to get there. If I told you to go to Las Vegas, I am sure that you could probably get there, but that is becasue almost everyone has been to Las Vegas. Now if you have never been, you would go out and look on a map where it it, but as you can see Las Vegas is a pretty big place. Most of us stay to The Strip or around that area, and thus you can go and look up just where you want to be on The Strip rather than a map of all the surrounding areas. Sure some of us would like to take a tour of the Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon while we are there, but if we were to use the same map for both of these actions, the maps would have to be huge. Nowadays, we just tell them where we want to go, and they will gladly print you a map. This new map technology is limitless as, just think about it. We have iPhones, GPS, and the fact that we do not have to stop and make a call. This has just happened over the last 20 years, yet maps have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. If this is us now, where will be in 10, 20, or 30 years from know.