Rough Guides That Anchor and the Affordances of Digital Maps

How, and to what extent, are people’s senses of place, sense of security, practice performances, and social positions anchored through engagement with digital maps? To address this question, the chapter shows that they are engaged with as hypermediate centring resources that add legitimacy to other sources of information. It adds that digital maps are engaged with as ‘rough guides’ only, and within situated contexts where people remain tolerant of error. Meanwhile, they do anchor practices in both a material sense (where people go, why, and how they get there) and an immaterial one (in terms of orientation, perception of place, and sense of security). Within this, there is a knowledgeable deferral in which the digital map is held as veracious yet incomplete—emergent and prone to error. Here, the chapter makes in-roads with environmental psychology and notions of a Bayesian brain, whereby engaging with the affordances of digital maps is not treated as an insular activity, but conducted alongside drawing on memory traces of comparable past activities, and locally situated, Thus, digital maps anchor the movement of people and things in everyday life, but only partially and with an awareness of their incompleteness.