Too busy to read?

We need maps and models as guides. But frequently, we don't remember that our maps and models are abstractions and thus we fail to understand their limits. We forget there is a territory that exists separately from the map. This territory contains details the map doesn't describe.

Twenty years ago I might have been able to believe that in 2016 we'd have maps for the entire world on our personal handheld devices. But I could not have been convinced we'd have them with street views of the buildings for many cities, or apps that showed the locations of public toilets, and that it would give us spoken directions for walking or public transit, and that we'd have all this mapping and more "for free." It seemed starkly impossible back then. And this free abundance still seems hard to believe in theory. Yet here it is on hundreds of millions of phones.