Progression Of Maps Essay

First, I wanted to cover maps as an intellectual technology that has changed the way people think. The progression of maps to where they are today can be illustrated and is closely paralleled by childhood cognitive development. Maps, like a child’s development, went from a “egocentric, purely sensory perception of the world to… [a] abstract and objective analysis of experience.” It also caused society to go from a purely sensory observation of the world to a more abstract and objective view of life. The map didn’t just grow along with the development of the human mind, it was itself a factor in propelling the intellectual advances that the map makers were recording. People additionally shifted in their perception of the world first to an intellectual realism which changed into a to visual realism. What this means is that the map makers first drew rudimentary constructions of the object they were drawing but without a fixed viewpoint, while as map making progressed they began to create the maps by depicting what they saw, as from a viewpoint that stays the same. …show more content…
Or to put it in an over-simplified interpretation often used nowadays, the child draws what he/she 'knows', rather than what he/she 'sees'. In contrast. when we say a child draws visually realistic drawings, he/she depicts what he/she 'sees', as if from a fixed point. I
Maps do not simply store information they also embody a certain kind of thinking and seeing. As a result of the proliferation and availability of maps, as time progressed, people began to think in a maps terms. The spread of maps also allowed people to “see” and discover new places and thing they had not known about before. Which allowed people to have a more comprehending mind, they could have knowledge of things they couldn’t see before, outside if their direct