View Miles of My Meals in a larger map
One of my critiques on the My Maps application on Google Maps is the fact that for the sake of this particular map idea I feel limited to only plotting distribution locations of the components of my lunch. I wish I could show the various places and distances travelled starting from the production of the food items to processing to packaging and finally to distributing these entities to their final destination--the grocery store. Yet, plotting these points for each food item makes for a very disorganized visual representation and the message I am trying to make becomes lost in scattered dots. Furthermore, My Maps does not provide much freedom in the topographical visualization of the map nor does it give much freedom in the way my points are labeled.
Nonetheless, I believe the My Maps works as a good application for basic geographical presentations and a good starting point for those presentations that are more complex. I enjoyed the fact that I was able to Google Map something and thoughtlessly add the particular landmark to My Maps, thus, making the map constructing process quick and almost painless. I also appreciated the tutorial Youtube video Google provided for My Maps. This tutorial introduces an opportunity to provide any Internet user the potential to create a Google Map. The map’s generation will not only convey a message the creator aimed to make but it will add to the information database of the Google search engine making this message available to otherwise intangible audiences. This potentially generates yet another form of communication between people around the world and, thus, adding more gravity and more realization of topics these generated maps discuss.
When depicting messages and images on a map one is not merely telling the audience something; one is actively showing them. As the famous saying goes, “Tell me and I’ll forget; Show me and I may remember, Involve me and I’ll understand.” Because of my involvement in actively attempting to find out the distribution points and production sites of all the components that make up my daily lunch meal I now realize the power I hold in where I buy my products. Grocery stores that buy their food locally are less harmful to the environment and more often than not possess safer and healthier foods. The fact that it was so difficult to even find out where half of my items were produced brang nausea to my stomach and hopefully this map may bring about the same bizarre realizations and curiosities in consumption that I now possess.
