Mapping and This American Life

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the radio show This American Life you’ve missed out…

I say that because a little over a year ago I was introduced to it by my manager Joe (he’s also a good friend of mine). Well lets just say that I felt as if I had missed out for a long time. So when I got this assignment to write about an episode of This American Life I can honestly say I was excited. The episode happens to be one of my favorites too “110: Mapping.” I listened to it in October when it originally aired and the part that stuck with me the most was this:
“Maps have meaning because they filter out all the chaos in the world and focus obsessively on one item.”
This show also showed me that my life is filled with maps and I didn’t even know it. Maps people have created and my own internal maps make up my everyday life. It’s weird when you think about how important they are.

In the first act, “sight,” Ira Glass interviews Denis Wood who obsessively maps his neighborhood. My favorite map he describes is the pumpkin map. It wasn’t until I got this assignment though that I actually went and looked at the map. What’s interesting about this (and why they picked this story) is that Mr. Wood doesn’t map things that most people wouldn’t and does it in a way that you or I wouldn’t think to map. He maps things like jack lanterns with no reference point so all you see is the faces of these carved pumpkins. This has a kind of insight that’s hard to describe. The relationships of the pumpkins to one another and the kinds of faces that are made show something about that place and the people that live there.

Act two, “sound,” is an interesting look at sound that fills our lives. I see how this is relevant to the mapping show I find myself not all that intrigued or really just finding no new insight by it. I do like music and sound but when they first started talking about the subject there were so many other way they could have gone, yet I found myself listening to a microwave for two minutes… thanks. I also have some problems with the introduction to this catholic idea of sound. I’m pretty skeptical and pretty critical of religion as a whole so you can imagine the idea that the Catholic Church coming up with a feeling and a superstition assigned to that sound was, well, its amusing really. Then they kind of finished that idea up with a music critic that wrote a book that gave the Church’s sound assignment a “new suit” for the new age. Of course I’m highly skeptical that the book, like the Church’s definitions, has any real scientific fact or study behind it to make it at all relevant. I would guess it’s just the articulate rantings of a music critic. I haven’t read it so I wouldn’t know nor am I musically educated enough to be able to but I would think that a PHD in Psychology would write a book about such a thing. Anyways I’m getting off topic here (because I think they did) overall this section was of no use to me.

Act three, “smell,” charting the worlds objects through smell… let me just qualify my response: I love science. This story was a breath of fresh air from the previous story. What they talk about in this story is an artificial nose produced to (stating the obvious) smell. Apart from the fun and entertaining production of the story it was interesting to me because it didn’t show how your house is interesting or your city is interesting. It showed how WE are interesting and how the biological systems are interesting. They didn’t really get to it until the end but what he story suggests is how animals (and that includes us human animals) map our smells. This artificial nose has to program in the smells mapping what each smell is just like we have to. What the reporter touched on was a sense of where the machine becomes human. She says that smell seems human but this was after a discussion on how dogs are way better at smelling than we are. So I was a bit confused about where she was going with that other than what I see is obvious is that our senses aren’t special but rather a way for our body to gain information like the artificial nose.

Act four, “touch,” body mapping…
I’m sorry but all I can think about is that song that goes “when I think about you I touch myself” sorry I just had to get that out…
Well let me just say that this was interesting and amusing. But it was also kinda sad. This story wasn’t so much about mapping “the body” but more about mapping the psychological issues people have from day to day. This reporter talks about her own struggle with a sever case of hypochondria and the map of her body she creates is one that exists only in her mind. This topic is interesting because it brings up this idea of how we all see ourselves versus what’s actually there. The sorority girl that thinks she’s fat or the geek that isn’t “cool” are just some stereotypical examples but we all do this every day of our lives to some degree.

Act five, “taste,” I’m hungry… This story is about a guy who maps a street in L.A. focusing on food. This is a fairly straightforward story of mapping. The thing that I remembered most was the anecdote of the punk rocker and the “oaky dog” (not sure about the spelling). Really this story just makes me hungry…