BROOKE GLADSTONE:  As we just heard, Putin has been leaning on Google, specifically Google Maps. There, Crimea is still part of Ukraine. But whatever Google does or doesn't do, it’s sure to be politically and culturally fraught.

As Pacific Standard Editor John Gravois told us a couple of years ago, Google is very familiar with cartographic controversy. 

JOHN GRAVOIS:  The whole mapmaking enterprise supported the expansion of European powers out into unfamiliar territory. Mapmaking was also something that came under this sort of industrial era progressive-minded idea that everything can be measured, the world can be indexed; we can narrow down to a clear account of pretty much everything. The colonial era came crashing to an end and with that mapmaking changed. 

A geographer I spoke to named Michael Goodchild, he described this historical process where modernist state-run data collection efforts went by the wayside gradually. Satellites started to take their place.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Let's talk about satellites. Obviously, you can get a much more accurate picture of the world but, as you note, there’s a lot that we can't get from satellites. That’s where Google comes in with its Map Maker tool, which any person can use. How does it work?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Google has set up a pretty straightforward user-friendly platform called Google Map Maker that allows people in hitherto unmapped parts of the world to just enter in information about the place where they live. There’s also a thing called the Community Layer of Google Earth, which is just like a bulletin board that’s tagged to a map. 

And in Israel, a Palestinian user of Google Earth was going around and tagging different towns as what he said were the sites of former Palestinian villages destroyed in the 1948 creation of Israel. And he tagged a town called Kiryat Yam as one of those villages. The people in Kiryat Yam were very upset by this. They said, in fact, our town was founded on barren sand dunes and you've basically slandered us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Another Google-fueled cartographic controversy is over what to call that body of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  For years and years and years and years, that body of water has been known as the Persian Gulf. But in the 1960s, there was a movement in Arab countries to call it the Arabian Gulf. This arose with Arab nationalism and was promoted by Saddam Hussein, among many, many other people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And obviously, Persia is a reference to Iran, which is not an Arabic nation, and Iran took this very personally.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  That’s putting it lightly.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS] 

It’s been a big dispute for decades now. In 2004, National Geographic issued a new edition of its main atlas and included the name Arabian Gulf as an alternate name in parentheses, in small print. The Iranians staged huge email campaigns, letter-writing campaigns, street protests. In Iran itself, all National Geographic products were banned, boycotted. And, at the time, one of the largest Google bombs to date was created in response to it, as well, where if you searched for the term “Arabian Gulf” on Google, the top result was a website that looked like an error message that said, “I'm sorry, the Gulf you’re looking for doesn't exist.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS] 

Please try “Persian Gulf.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] Now, Google took the National Geographic route, essentially, didn't it, by listing both names?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Yes, on Google Earth, if you go to the Gulf, you'll see in equal-sized text Persian Gulf near Iran, and Arabian Gulf near Qatar and Bahrain and the UAE and Saudi Arabia. So Google isn't taking the National Geographic route, in one respect, which is that it’s not backing down.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  And one of the largest online petitions on the internet today is a petition that demands the immediate and unconditional deletion of “Arabian Gulf” from Google Earth. And what’s interesting about the petition is that it attacks Google for not adhering to the standards of cartography that might have been espoused by 19th century mapmakers. The Iranian petition accuses Google of not obeying international standards. 

Google’s response was really interesting. A couple of months after the petition went live they posted a kind of statement about how they decide what to name things, and the statement made no mention of history, made no mention of international standards. They just said, we name bodies of water according to the names that countries adjoining that body of water use. There’s no science, except for the science of just finding out what people say.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So what do you think about Google’s repudiation of history and tradition?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Well, it follows a pretty standard kind of philosophy of the internet era, which is, you know, the more information, the better, the more democratic the production of information, the better. But Google gets itself into trouble. Google is now producing the world’s most important map. That used to be something nation-states did. And what’s happening in all these geographic disputes is that Google is getting confused with a nation-state, and not just any one, a really important one –

  [BROOKE LAUGHS] 

- a powerful one. In all of these conflicts, you see parties to these disputes accuse Google of being geopolitical conspirators. The whole time, Google is kind of shrugging and saying, we're showing as many claims as possible, trying to be neutral.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is what people are calling neo-geography, where we can layer our maps with all kinds of information? Doesn't that raise the question what is it we want our maps to be now, if no longer a single authoritative view of the world?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  It’s almost like we shouldn't use the word “map” anymore. It’s a completely different thing. It’s a completely re-scalable document that can hold authoritative information, but it can also have other layers of information that are just sort of repositories of a bunch of different opinions or even conversations. That’s neat and it may play a really huge valuable social role in the future. But the process of adjusting to that new norm is going to be really, really hairy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  John, thank you very much.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  John Gravois is a deputy editor of Pacific Standard. 

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  As we just heard, Putin has been leaning on Google, specifically Google Maps. There, Crimea is still part of Ukraine. But whatever Google does or doesn't do, it’s sure to be politically and culturally fraught.

As Pacific Standard Editor John Gravois told us a couple of years ago, Google is very familiar with cartographic controversy. 

JOHN GRAVOIS:  The whole mapmaking enterprise supported the expansion of European powers out into unfamiliar territory. Mapmaking was also something that came under this sort of industrial era progressive-minded idea that everything can be measured, the world can be indexed; we can narrow down to a clear account of pretty much everything. The colonial era came crashing to an end and with that mapmaking changed. 

A geographer I spoke to named Michael Goodchild, he described this historical process where modernist state-run data collection efforts went by the wayside gradually. Satellites started to take their place.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Let's talk about satellites. Obviously, you can get a much more accurate picture of the world but, as you note, there’s a lot that we can't get from satellites. That’s where Google comes in with its Map Maker tool, which any person can use. How does it work?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Google has set up a pretty straightforward user-friendly platform called Google Map Maker that allows people in hitherto unmapped parts of the world to just enter in information about the place where they live. There’s also a thing called the Community Layer of Google Earth, which is just like a bulletin board that’s tagged to a map. 

And in Israel, a Palestinian user of Google Earth was going around and tagging different towns as what he said were the sites of former Palestinian villages destroyed in the 1948 creation of Israel. And he tagged a town called Kiryat Yam as one of those villages. The people in Kiryat Yam were very upset by this. They said, in fact, our town was founded on barren sand dunes and you've basically slandered us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Another Google-fueled cartographic controversy is over what to call that body of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  For years and years and years and years, that body of water has been known as the Persian Gulf. But in the 1960s, there was a movement in Arab countries to call it the Arabian Gulf. This arose with Arab nationalism and was promoted by Saddam Hussein, among many, many other people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  And obviously, Persia is a reference to Iran, which is not an Arabic nation, and Iran took this very personally.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  That’s putting it lightly.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS] 

It’s been a big dispute for decades now. In 2004, National Geographic issued a new edition of its main atlas and included the name Arabian Gulf as an alternate name in parentheses, in small print. The Iranians staged huge email campaigns, letter-writing campaigns, street protests. In Iran itself, all National Geographic products were banned, boycotted. And, at the time, one of the largest Google bombs to date was created in response to it, as well, where if you searched for the term “Arabian Gulf” on Google, the top result was a website that looked like an error message that said, “I'm sorry, the Gulf you’re looking for doesn't exist.

  [BROOKE LAUGHS] 

Please try “Persian Gulf.”

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  [LAUGHS] Now, Google took the National Geographic route, essentially, didn't it, by listing both names?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Yes, on Google Earth, if you go to the Gulf, you'll see in equal-sized text Persian Gulf near Iran, and Arabian Gulf near Qatar and Bahrain and the UAE and Saudi Arabia. So Google isn't taking the National Geographic route, in one respect, which is that it’s not backing down.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  Mm-hmm.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  And one of the largest online petitions on the internet today is a petition that demands the immediate and unconditional deletion of “Arabian Gulf” from Google Earth. And what’s interesting about the petition is that it attacks Google for not adhering to the standards of cartography that might have been espoused by 19th century mapmakers. The Iranian petition accuses Google of not obeying international standards. 

Google’s response was really interesting. A couple of months after the petition went live they posted a kind of statement about how they decide what to name things, and the statement made no mention of history, made no mention of international standards. They just said, we name bodies of water according to the names that countries adjoining that body of water use. There’s no science, except for the science of just finding out what people say.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  So what do you think about Google’s repudiation of history and tradition?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Well, it follows a pretty standard kind of philosophy of the internet era, which is, you know, the more information, the better, the more democratic the production of information, the better. But Google gets itself into trouble. Google is now producing the world’s most important map. That used to be something nation-states did. And what’s happening in all these geographic disputes is that Google is getting confused with a nation-state, and not just any one, a really important one –

  [BROOKE LAUGHS] 

- a powerful one. In all of these conflicts, you see parties to these disputes accuse Google of being geopolitical conspirators. The whole time, Google is kind of shrugging and saying, we're showing as many claims as possible, trying to be neutral.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  This is what people are calling neo-geography, where we can layer our maps with all kinds of information? Doesn't that raise the question what is it we want our maps to be now, if no longer a single authoritative view of the world?

JOHN GRAVOIS:  It’s almost like we shouldn't use the word “map” anymore. It’s a completely different thing. It’s a completely re-scalable document that can hold authoritative information, but it can also have other layers of information that are just sort of repositories of a bunch of different opinions or even conversations. That’s neat and it may play a really huge valuable social role in the future. But the process of adjusting to that new norm is going to be really, really hairy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  John, thank you very much.

JOHN GRAVOIS:  Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:  John Gravois is a deputy editor of Pacific Standard. 

  [MUSIC UP & UNDER]