Conclusion

This chapter collates seven concepts generated in earlier chapters and explains how they cumulatively form a practice-orientated digital sociology of map use. This includes: Positioning engagement over use as a more encompassing term, including media as latent resources; knowledgeable deferral to defaults, which may be media-scripted or hypermediated; the affordance to preview or postview place through digital maps, i.e., via seemingly veracious and indexical photo-realist imagery; the anchoring of senses of place (real and imaged), senses of security (physical and ontological), and practice performances; digital maps as centring resources that remediate existing media and hypermediate data form elsewhere; also strategic curation, where digital maps can be drawn on for authority, lending legitimacy to claims to inform or persuade others; also that trust is placed within maps as rough guides, where knowledgeable deferral follows a Bayesian inferential logic with practices not only anchored by digital maps, but also through memory traces, and in-situ perception. After explaining how the framework might be adapted for examining engagement with a broad range of digital media, the chapter closes with a suggestion that more ought to be done to inform a wider public on the potential risks of deferral and the data politics at stake.