Once, maps were specialised tools: a battle chart for generals, a nautical guide for captains, a city plan for urban planners. Today, we tap our screens to navigate, order food, play games, find dates, and organise gig work—all through the same ubiquitous digital maps that have become our primary interface with the world.
Maps as Media examines this profound transformation. Drawing on media studies, critical geography, and science and technology studies, it reveals how platforms like Google Maps, Waze, and Pokémon GO exercise power not through overt control, but through what the book terms casual power—the subtle influence of seamless design, playful interfaces, and habituated routines.
What the Book Explores
Movement
How autonomous vehicles and algorithmic navigation are transforming us from navigators into passengers, led rather than leading.
Play
How gamification and playful interfaces depoliticise cartography, masking surveillance beneath fun and encouraging data extraction through entertainment.
Work
How platform labour—from food delivery to ride-hailing—is mediated and controlled through cartographic interfaces that blur the boundaries between worker and algorithm.
Surveillance
How infrastructural surveillance operates through maps, tracking our movements not through panoptic observation but through seamless integration into daily routines.
Casual Power
The book's central theoretical contribution is the concept of casual power—how mapping technologies exercise influence through habituation and invisibility rather than visibility and control. Unlike traditional cartographic power that operates through ideological distortion or surveillance, casual power works by making maps feel natural, helpful, and innocent.
"No other image has enjoyed such prestige of neutrality and objectivity... The most oppressive and dangerous of all cultural artefacts may be the ones so naturalised and presumably commonsensical as to avoid critique." — Raymond Craib, historian
By examining interface design, gamification, metrics, and layered visualisations, the book reveals how digital maps strip down the world into optimised approximations—benefiting the economic interests of their creators while shielding themselves from the scrutiny we reserve for social media and shopping apps.
Looking Forward
The book concludes by examining emerging challenges: the blurring boundaries between maps and datasets, the disappearance of interfaces through autonomous vehicles and augmented reality, and the encroachment of generative AI on cartographic epistemology.
Early Praise
"A strong and original contribution on an important topic. This book offers a unique take on digital maps—there is no existing work that does what this book is doing."
— Anonymous Reviewer"Very well placed and amply qualified... This book will appeal to critical geography scholars, but its real audience is those in media and communication fields, where such a book is sorely needed."
— Anonymous ReviewerAbout the Author
For Course Adoption
Suitable for courses in:
- Media Studies & Digital Culture
- Critical Geography & Urban Studies
- Science and Technology Studies
- Platform Studies & Critical Algorithm Studies
- Surveillance Studies
- Digital Methods & Interface Studies
If you teach a course where Maps as Media could be assigned, we'd appreciate your input. Fill out the form below to express interest in an inspection copy (subject to availability).
Course Adoption Interest
Please share your details below if you're interested in adopting Maps as Media for your course. This information helps Polity Press identify potential adopters and provide inspection copies where available.
Connect
For media inquiries, speaking engagements, or podcast bookings: a.gekker@uva.nl
Follow updates about the book and related work at alexgekker.com