ABSTRACT
This paper argues that the recent enthusiasm with digital maps in the context of humanitarian response efforts underscores a shift in the understanding of mapping. While maps were traditionally understood as mimetic representations of a referent object (a city, a country or the globe), this understanding was severely critiqued during the second half of the twentieth century for two reasons. First, due to the impossibility of representing an outside reality without generating remainders. Second, maps were seen as power assets that generate political and social consequences. However, rather than discrediting maps or antagonizing power, it will be argued that these critiques have facilitated the emergence of a new understanding of maps as navigational tools that allow people to travel. In the context of mass consumption and the advent of digital technologies, the chapter shows how maps seem untethered from a reality out there and questions of the power effects are increasingly eluded. This flattening of the meaning of maps, the paper will conclude, has given them momentum, but has stripped maps of their value as cultural resources and expressions of the common humanity and degraded the purpose of humanitarianism.
