Mapping & navigating trio

Here we expand on the trio of mapping and navigating tools in the Extended trinity.


'Promoted specials' in an extended trinity

- **Mapping** - Means of applying a user-specific custom mapping layer to any field of content - eg tagging, and tag-cloud maps. >This is ‘the world as I/we, specifically, need to engage with it’

- **Analytics or ‘mirrors’** - Means of identifying emergent pattern in a big, undisciplined field of ‘scraped’ data, or a complex, distributed, unclearly bounded network. *These need to be channelled to the participant-contributors in that field, rather than syphoned off as ‘intelligence’, by some digital landlord, as tacit rent or taxation on the use of some superficially ‘free’ digital space (eg social media).* And . . we don't mean 'trending' and other 'follow-me' clickbait. We mean tuneable, like a radar scan or a survey. >This is ‘the world that is evolving, beyond my/our immediate perception, where I am tacitly an actor’

- **‘News from elsewhere’** - Means of publishing, broadcasting, narrowcasting. Means also, of hearing from and tuning-into other locations - in place, in time, in culture. *News, journalism, alerts. History, legacy, origins. Accounts of life being lived across fields of very uneven development. Includes ‘free speech’.* Grounded in the free-web principle of **federating**. >This is ‘the world that I/we intend to affiliate with, or resonate with’

The elements in this 'mapping and navigating trio' are **affordances** rather than stand-alone apps. They're essential for systemic engagement in a real-world external environment - and in that sense remain similar to the tools that remain in the 'specials’ category.

While the other tools in the extended trinity are *means of coordination*, this trio are **means of engagement & perception**.

They may not be implemented well in a given app or platform or protocol, and they may call for unusual skill, and meta-vision, to use them well. As so often, this is as much a matter of **culture** - eg work organisation, common genres and social protocols, vision & intuition - as of tooling. Let's not get too techie about this 🙃