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Place name mappings probably need a time dimension too

 2 years ago
source link: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2022/06/15/places/
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Place name mappings probably need a time dimension too

I used to work at Facebook. That was both the name of the service with all of the cat pictures and the name of the company that paid me every two weeks. The cat picture part still has the same name, but the parent company does not. It's called Meta now. I left well before any of that renaming happened.

As a result, I have plenty of pictures that predate that change on my Macs and other Apple devices. They're mostly geotagged, but something curious has happened to them: the name of the place has shifted. It's no longer "Facebook HQ". It's now "Meta - Headquarters". This is what it looks like in the Apple photos app:

Building map on the ground at FB, 2014

Given that this picture was taken in 2014, it was clearly not Meta back then. I know, the usual "well actually" people are warming up their keyboards right about now: "it used to be called that, and it's the same company, so it's fine" and so on and so forth. I don't like that, but okay, whatever, let's say we accept that for the moment because it IS the same company with a different name. Companies do that all the time.

What if that picture of the ground had been taken in that same spot in 2004? Would it still make sense to call it "Meta - Headquarters"? I hope you wouldn't say that. Back then, that space was inhabited by Sun Microsystems, a company that very much is not the same as Facebook. (This is well before Oracle ate them - that was 2009-2010.)

What happens in another couple of years when Meta is the next smoking crater in the tech landscape and then some other company tries to become the next unicorn in the mud flats of Menlo Park? Or how about a couple of decades past then when that whole area is underwater? Will my pictures say something like "San Francisco Bay"?

This why I would say that perhaps we need some time bounding on these hyperlocal place names. Now, I realize this is no small thing. It's one of those big-O blowup factors, and that's annoying for all involved. Still, if you take the very long view on these things, something is going to have to happen eventually. Otherwise, our grandkids will have pictures that we took that make no sense at all.

There should also be some actual humanity applied here. Place names are non-trivial, and many of them have captured a large amount of hateful and just plain ignorant behavior. That's why you can't just automatically build up a list of "this place was called this at this time". It needs people in the loop to make thoughtful decisions about how to handle the more interesting ones.

Case in point: Palisades Tahoe. I also have pictures that I took there many years ago. I am more than fine with them being rendered with its current name. I know it wasn't called that when I was there. Give it an asterisk if you must, but really, even that probably isn't needed.

That's what I mean when I say that we should be careful about this.


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