Tag Archives: google street view
What would Plato say about Google Street View?
I was as addicted as the next geek to Google Street View when it launched.
I ‘walked’ down to town and back, hung out for a while, then ‘walked’ right back home again.
Then I thought, “Hang on, get a life!” and realised that if I so wished, I could do all of this minus computer, thank you very much.
I didn’t need Google to show me the world; I had eyes of my own after all.
But then I heard about Bill Guffey in Kentucky, US, who’s taken up travelling the world, visiting stunning locations and painting them, all via Google Street View and without leaving his living room.
He’s ‘hiked’ through every US state as well as much of Europe, creating over 100 paintings so far, and they sell well, apparently.
Whatever flips your pancake.
But this, naturally, led my solipsistic mind to consider the very notion of reality and Plato’s Myth of the Cave, a famous but troubling philosophical analogy that asks whether what we know to be reality is really only a reflection or representation of reality.
Plato blathered about prisoners kept chained in a cave, and only shown shadows of objects cast from a fire. They believe these shadows to be true reality, not reflections, and they don’t know otherwise until a philosopher breaks the begrudging prisoners free.
I puzzled over who were the prisoners and who is the philosopher in today’s art imitating virtual reality reality? And what part did Bill Guffey play?
Had Google-Guffey created an inverse Myth of Plato’s cave?
Then I thought, “Hang on, get a life!” It probably doesn’t matter.
Or does it?
