Poor Situation Awareness.
An extract from ‘Wayfinding’ Michael Bond
"Modern humans interact with the world in much the same way that prehistoric humans did. We may travel further and faster, and we have some fabulously clever instruments to help us get around, but the manner in which we use our brains to stay orientated is not so different,
We scout landmarks, attend to our surroundings, memorise vistas, build 'cognitive maps' and generally keep our spatial wits about us, just as the hunter-gatherers of the Pleistocene did. Some of us are a lot better at this than others, and that is the way it has always been.
At least, this was the case until around the year 2000; since then, a great deal has changed. Many of us now delegate all that cognitive heavy lifting to GPS-enabled navigation tools, which guide us where we want to go without us having to attend to anything. Follow the blue dot on your smartphone app or obey your satnav's spoken instructions and you'll arrive at your destination without having troubled the place cells in your hippocampus or the decision-making circuitry of your prefrontal cortex. You won't have to know how you got there or remember anything about the route you took.
For the first time in the history of human evolution, we have stopped using many of the spatial skills that have sustained us for tens of thousands of years."
GPS turns the world into abstract embedded in a digital device. Web searches, instant answers, we exchange these for absolute certainty, we sacrifice our sense of place - replacing cognitive skill with technology - reassign mental resource.
Todays (mapless) need is to pay attention to the surroundings, build a mental map, note the shape character of items, links, sequence of turns; without these we lack the projection aspect of situation awareness, not being able to thinking ahead, or being ready for surprises. … we move through the world unaware, and not be affected by our lack of knowledge. No immediate raw experience of the real, we miss the opportunity to develop rich knowledge an rich remembering.
The issue is not to stop using the technology, its being aware of the decision and the effects it might have.