GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION: Value, Pricing, Production, and Consumption - Chapter 5

chapter five Geographic information, globalization, and society 5.1 Introduction This chapter explores the nature and role of geographic information* (GI) in contemporary society. Earlier chapters have looked at the value of GI and business and pricing issues, and Chapter 6 will explore the economic and political tensions that impact on the availability of information. This chapter starts by unpacking one of the prevailing myths of GI — that it is every-where as a fundamental component of all information. It then looks more generally at the politics of information, at the development of spatial data infrastructures, and at privacy and surveillance in the context of GI products that enhance our mobility, but may threaten our privacy. It will examine paradoxes emerging over data protection, data privacy, and anonymity, and the policy-stated benefits of better services to citizens, reduced social and economic exclusion, democracy, and participation, noting key theories about the (geographic) information society. 5.2 The ubiquity of GI Is GI the most important component of any type of information? It was pro-moted in the late twentieth century as a fundamental underpinning of the information spaces of government, economy, and society. The often repeated statement is that “around 80% of information is estimated to contain a spa-tial content” (Lawrence, 2004), an “estimated 80% of government data has spatial component” (FGDC, 2004b), and “Es wird etwa geschätzt, dass 80% aller Entscheidungen eine räumliche Komponente enthalten und durch Geo-information verbessert werden könnten” (Frank, 2002, p. 11). The 80% claim is replicated without clarification in GI policy from governments (GIPanel, 2005; Scotland, 2006), in a progress report on U.S. presidential initiatives in eGovernment** (OMB, 2006), by industry associations promoting geographic information technologies (GITA, 2006), and by the military (MOD, 2006). * The acronym GI as used in this chapter should be taken as synonymous with terms such as geospatial information and spatial information, now widely used in much of the literature. ** Fast Fact: Studies indicate that roughly 80% of all government information has a geo-graphic component. 123 ` 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 124 Geographic Information: Value, Pricing, Production, and Consumption However, it is very difficult to source this estimate back to the original underpinning evidence, although Rob Mahoney (personal communication, May 2005) confirmed to us that he used the figure in evidence provided by British Gas to the U.K. Chorley Enquiry (which reported in 1987; see below), with 60 to 70% of British Gas data being spatially referenced. The figure was later revised to 80% in a presentation at the AM/FM 1988 Conference in Not-tingham, U.K., which also marked the creation of the U.K. Association for Geographic Information. In addition, an information audit carried out by Medway Council (U.K.) noted: “Of the 180 database repositories, 121 had some and 11 a possible geographic reference, i.e. around 75% in all. Of the other repositories, 77 or just fewer than 60% had some geographic reference” (Schmid et al., 2003, p. 5). GI was noted as being a key component of European public sector infor-mation (PSI) (PIRA, 2000) and is the subject of a specific European Union (EU) directive, called INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe), which assumed legal force on May 15, 2007, designed to integrate GI within all 27 EU member states. In the U.K., the government review in 1987 (the Chorley Report) argued that GI and geographic information systems (GISs) were as significant for society and the economy as was “the printing press to information dissemination” (Environment, 1987, p. 8). Governments that were not focusing sufficiently on GI were arguably not benefiting the economy and society. In Germany, a study argued that the limited dissemi-nation of GI to the market meant “only approximately 15% of the market vol-ume which could be attained in North Rhine Westphalia has actually been achieved” (Fornefeld and Oefinger, 2001, p. 1). In the U.S., the presidential order establishing the National Spatial Data Infrastructure stated: “Geo-graphic information is critical to promote economic development, improve our stewardship of natural resources, and protect the environment” (Clin-ton, 1994). Early justification for the European Union’s INSPIRE directive focused on GI as critical input to policy development that address the “grow-ing interconnection and complexity of the issues affecting the quality of life today” (Europe, 2004b, p. 2). One outcome of promoting the centrality of GI was a risk of raising GI and GIS onto a disciplinary pedestal where it could become an easy target for hostile critique. For, as GIS promoted the centrality of information and tech-nology, so geography — the natural host discipline — was in the process of rejecting methodologies that centered on data and quantitative analysis. In the mid-1980s, the quantitative search for order and classification was giving way to qualitative methodologies and the search for difference and unique-ness. While it is too extreme to argue that GI/GIS largely diverged from geog-raphy in most geography departments, the quantitative approaches had been a lessening focus in human geography, and mutual critiques often became polarized. Consequently, John Pickles’s edited book Ground Truth (Pickles, 1995) was an objective attempt to review the prevailing methodology of GIS, but was often taken as anti-GIS. A GIS stores numerical information ` 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Chapter five: Geographic Information, Globalization, and Society 125 about reality, such as coordinates and statistical and feature attributes, and therefore imposes a particular digital classification of social, economic, and environmental features of the real analogue world. People are not so much regarded as individuals, but as attributes linked to coordinate space. Roads, paths, and houses are not social spaces where people interact socially and economically, but are assets to be defined as coordinates and to be managed by governments and businesses. Therefore, as geography explored new concepts of spaces, GIS remained obdurately focused on coordinate space, and 8 years after Ground Truth, John Pickles wrote A History of Spaces, which eloquently — but in a language that most GIS professionals would find obscure — explored the narrow techno-logical focus of GIS (Pickles, 2003). That is why much interesting research about spatiality has occurred beyond geography, often in sociology. Thus, while the GIS community may map location within physical polygons/areas such as regions, John Urry writes of regions, networks, and fluids, where networks are spatial structures that transcend the physical boundaries demarcated in the GIS, and social spaces act as fluids that may or may not be contained within the polygons: “Fluids account for the unevenness and het-erogeneous skills, technologies, interventions and tacit knowledge” (Urry, 2003, p. 42). Fluids are exceptionally difficult to represent in a GIS, which until recently was not good at storing, manipulating, or representing three-dimensional or temporal data, and as human geography moved to embrace sociology, GIS became more isolated from geography. There were some mediations in the isolation, in what Nadine Schuurman (2000) calls the “factionalisation in geography.” She notes that there has been much research on the social impact of GIS, and in its use within participatory societal applications, but these activities are relatively small scale compared to the sales of technologies worldwide. Indicative estimates of the size of the global GIS/geospatial data market vary considerably from $1 billion to $5 billion a year for GIS products, to 10 times that amount for related services and application. Wherever the figure lies in that spectrum, the market is sig-nificant, and the role of the GIS vendors in promulgating the technology in developing and developed nations is significant. There is often a tendency to link the technology to the direct solution of societal and economic problems. For example, the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) argues: “GIS strengthens the welfare of a nation’s citizens,”* and the section termed “Democracy and Peace” in its promotional literature claims that GIS can significantly contribute to stable and sustainable development “by helping to inform the public and to allow better access to government.”** It is little surprise that critics of GIS can take socioeconomic research and aim to rebut claims that technology has a direct impact on democracy and governance. * http://www.esri.com/getting_started/government/index.html. ** http://www.esri.com/industries/sustainable_dev/business/dem_peace.html. ` 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 126 Geographic Information: Value, Pricing, Production, and Consumption Thus, a GIS can be used in planning the location of a new hotel (site selec-tion), in identifying the potential customers (geodemographics and drive time), and in assessing risk from environmental events (slope failure and flood prediction). The location aspect of the hotel will allow the data to be used in searches and in Web mapping. The location can be linked then to other data, such as visual tours of the hotel (flash animation, etc.), and the hotel website can link to other geographical information, such as current weather and weather forecasts. That is fine, and it shows the power of GI, but overall what it is showing is the interplay of issues between physical assets and physical events. Let us select a real hotel, the Jordan Valley Marriott Resort & Spa.* It is an excellent hotel for those who wish to visit the Dead Sea, be pampered, and live well. Like most resort hotels it also displays the char-acteristics of a gated community, where the very clear boundary of the hotel is a border within which guests feel safe, and beyond which is the “local” world of people who generally are only welcome into the hotel space if they either work there or have sufficient resources to consume at the same level as the guests. So while a GIS will show the hotel as being proximate to the local community, it does not easily show the different “spaces” within which the two groups exist — in effect they do not coexist, and therefore the node/arc topology in coordinate terms gives only physical proximity information, not social and economic spaces information. GI and GIS here give only partial information about the local reality, and it is very difficult to use quantitative attribute information to represent the complexities of local spaces. 5.3 Sociotechnical implications of GI and GIS The main problem with the promotion of the claimed ubiquity of GI, and the role of GI technologies, is that it consequently must be involved with both beneficial and detrimental aspects of technology and society. While there are positive visions, GI also contributes to policy dilemmas about the increas-ing spatial resolution of GI and the societal concerns over intrusion, privacy, and confidentiality, for example, in the contest over disclosure control (Doyle et al., 2001) in official statistics. The late twentieth century saw a dramatic increase in the resolution and temporal extent of GI, with individual- and household-level data becoming widely produced by both statistical agencies and credit/marketing companies, and with remote sensing devices able to identify and track individuals, e.g., not just satellites, but also sensing, such as CCTV and cell phone tracking. However, it is not a one-way route from good to evil, where a technology developed for peaceable purposes becomes used for hostile purposes. Military surveillance technologies have been transferred to civilian use, for example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where move-ment detectors are used to detect the movement of elephant poachers, thus * http://www.marriott.com/property/propertypage/QMDJV. ` 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Chapter five: Geographic Information, Globalization, and Society 127 allowing security authorities to intercept them more effectively (Merali, 2006). The turbulent interplay of the production and consumption of GI and technologies deserves critical consideration. This is not only because there are societal and ethical issues, but also because it provides a useful feedback mechanism for technology producers. It is too easy to dismiss sociotechni-cal issues, as Michael Blakemore found when presenting these concerns in December 2005 at an international conference in the Netherlands — a GIS vendor representative responded that he did not really see why Mike should present the downsides of GIS, because there were “so many positives about GIS, and we should concentrate on them.” As more information is produced about us as individuals, we may, para-doxically, have less to say in how the information is managed. A dilemma exists in a contest over the production and verification of information — should a citizen be able to see what someone has written about him, and to challenge its veracity? That goes well beyond freedom of information laws, and attaches property rights to information about an individual (Purdam et al., 2004, p. 278). At present, we have some commercial access rights, such as the right to inspect our credit reference information (Experian, 2005), but the integration of health records in the U.K. has shown the general and critical lack of official data property rights, because patients do not have any rights to influence the information written about them by doctors, nor do they have any access rights to verify the information (BBC, 2005b). Perversely, while governments may seem reluctant to allow citizens access to their personal information, businesses often see benefit in allowing access. In 2006, the U.S. retailer Wal-Mart announced that it would construct a health database for its 100,000 employees, and the employees would be the owners of their data and determine who could access their records (Med-ford, 2006). Consequential fears do, however, exist in the context of function creep: Would Wal-Mart be tempted at some stage to monitor the records and identify employees who have illnesses that make them less cost-effective? However, only where a citizen has access to his or her health information can any personal management be undertaken, examples being the FollowMe service in the U.S.,* originally established by an individual who needed to have rapid access to the medical records of her son who suffered from hydro-cephalus, so that when they traveled, medical specialists could access impor-tant information (Economist, 2005a). It is not surprising, therefore, that concerns about informational iden-tity ownership should lead to contested positions, and this has particularly affected the use and dissemination of official statistics. The global governance of official statistics is provided by the United Nations; it promotes a general mantra that statisticians should aim for “a reasonable balance” between the economic and social benefits of data used, and the need to balance privacy and confidentiality (UNECE, 2001, p. 13). In practice, this balance is very * www.followme.com. ` 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ... - tailieumienphi.vn