Map Communication Model - Overview

Overview

By the mid-20th century, according to Crampton (2001) "cartographers as Arthur H. Robinson and others had begun to see the map as primarily a communication tool, and so developed a specific model for map communication, the map communication model (MCM)". This model, according to Andrews (1988) "can be grouped with the other major communication models of the time, such as the Shannon-Weaver and Lasswell models of communication. The map communication model led to a whole new body of research, methodologies and map design paradigms"

One of the implications of this communication model according to Donohue (2008) "endorsed an “epistemic break” that shifted our understandings of maps as communication systems to investigating them in terms of fields of power relations and exploring the “mapping environments in which knowledge is constructed”... This involved examining the social contexts in which maps were both produced and used, a departure from simply seeing maps as artifacts to be understood apart from this context". is a clear separation between cartographer and user, whereby the map was seen simply as an “intermediary between the cartographer and the user”.

A second implication of this model is the presumption inherited from positivism that it is possible to separate facts from values. As Harley stated: Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false. Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of representation maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations. By accepting such premises it becomes easier to see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in society.