The view from the street
The FameWorks were in Iqaluit last week, population 7,000, capital of the Canadian territory of Nunavut.
Actually that’s a complete lie... our ‘visit’ was courtesy of Google Street View. It’s worth a quick look, if only to marvel at the grindingly tough conditions in which some live their lives.
Check out North Mart on Queen Elizabeth II Way, proudly touting “groceries, family apparel and home entertainment.” Here’s St. Jude’s Cathedral, a pre-fab affair, not quite up there with Salisbury or Chartres. And now here’s the Arctic Survival Store with its bilingual signage on Nipisa Street. But hold on, what’s going on down on the seafront at the south of the town? Dangle the little orange fellow over the map again and, striking deep out into the bay by Iqaluit Harbour, a road appears. Put him back in his box and the road’s gone. Curiouser and curiouser…
It turns out that a team from Google travelled up in 2013 equipped with sturdy thermals and their special 360° cameras to collect the images for Street View. On their second day in the town, their PR people set up a meeting with the indigenous elders of Iqaluit, mostly (to their credit) out of respect, but also because they had some concrete questions about the place. As Omar el Akkad recounts in his brilliant new book One day everyone will always have been against this, one of the Google party asked, ‘What are the most important thoroughfares?’
‘In winter or summer?’ one of the elders replied.
El Akkad muses:
“It had not occurred to the Google mapmakers that what might be akin to a highway in December, could turn to water in July. Their cognitive toolkit had no means of grappling with something like this. Until now, their lexicon had been sufficient to describe everything they deemed worth describing.”
If you do visit in July, best not to take that road, whatever Google Maps says! This is not to criticise Google. Rather, there are surely lessons in the anecdote…
We all bring imperfect cognitive toolkits to the business of marketing insight and communication. There’s much to be said for striving to broaden our lexicons. And most of all being there in the sense of embodied human experience (of peoples, places and periods in time) is indispensable in these endeavours.