Centring Anchors and the Affordances of Digital Maps

Digital maps offer affordances for generating, amending, and recombining content in ways that previous map formats could not. But how do these affordances feature within people’s context-specific engagement with digital maps and interlinked practices? Addressing these questions, the chapter argues that people often take for granted affordances offered for generating digital map content. That is, rather than generating or amending content, people often knowledgeably defer to existing defaults. At the same time, within shared practices—individuals and social groups alike—engage with digital maps as centring resources. Here, digital maps act as a locus of information by hosting external datasets, becoming arbiters of access to other media resources. The latter leads some users to draw on digital maps as authoritative resources (for legitimation and authority) to mediate sociality, and through which potential inequality emerges, where some individuals draw on digital maps to anchor the senses of place, senses and security, practices, and performance of social positions of others. The chapter shows this is made possible when people engage with the web-based affordances of digital maps to inform or persuade others, strategically curating the information deferred to.