The Fifth Blog

                                       Google Earth –Not as Beautiful as It Looks Like

     As multidimensional meta-medium providing geographic information, Google Earth takes advantages of photographic technology, weather report and the Internet community and combines various elements into a vast map. While Google Earth is facilitating social life and actual physical, emotional experiences, it is not as beautiful as we can see.

Seeing pictures of destinations from different point of view using Google Earth is a pleasant business; however, privacy can be losing at the same time. Pictures are taken by the satellites without screened. As a result, personal properties such as lands and houses are easily searched and found. When it comes to military affairs, a tiny piece of information exposure is vital for the country due to the existence of Google Earth. According to The Dong-A Ilbo, a renowned newspaper in Korea, said that in the satellite photographs of Google Earth, air defense bases of the capital Seoul and surrounding area aiming at North Korea are clearly displayed. Although Korea has remonstrated with Google about such leak, there is no such an agreement to deal with the privacy loss.

Another problem Google Earth has to face is about quality and accuracy. It is not as accurate as one would expect it to be owing to various reasons. Symbolization of content and data is not only difficult to construct but also understood differently from person to person, which leads to information bias between makers and receivers. In addition, cost is much more troublesome comparing to symbolization. The source of revenue of Google Earth mainly depends on charged to the non-free version users. In spite of the cost to send a satellite into the space, Google has to pay millions of dollars for human resource to collect information, combine it with pictures, and promote the application. Briefly, symbolization and cost block the way for Google Earth to be more accurate.

The last but not the least, information lag makes Google Earth is not that reliable. World is changing all the time while Google Earth not. In such a situation that some pictures are taken nearly three years ago, little evidence can show that a definitely real world is displayed. To be specific, if a building is razed to the ground, it seems impossible for Google Earth to change the appearance the next minutes at current technology level. Unlike immediate transport of words or photographs using the Internet, it takes time for the changes in reality to be reflected in Google Earth.

Google Earth facilitates an increased range of personal and social actions, an extension of social space( Jakob Linaa Jensen, 2010). It makes a big improvement of simplex web map and creates a multifunctional application including world map system, Global Position System, weather system and so on. Nevertheless, Google Earth is not as beautiful as it looks like. If it aims to be a requisite application for life, these ineluctable issues including loss of privacy, accuracy and information lag must be solved.