While praising Google for bringing Street View to the Grand Canyon – “the company has captured the canyon with tremendous accuracy” – Jeremy Miller describes the limitations of virtual tourism:
[Street View Grand Canyon] feels conspicuously inadequate in critical ways.
On the virtual river you can fast-forward downstream, avoiding the soaking rapids and searing sun, putting in and taking out as you please. But part of the Grand Canyon experience is surrendering to the flow of the river and committing to the journey. Anyone who has traveled in canyon country knows how much the terrain can change in a matter of seconds during an afternoon rainstorm, or in the hours between noon and dusk, as sunlight glistens and fades upon the canyon walls. To these subtle but vital gradations, Google’s roving digital eye remains conspicuously blind.
I’d heard these shortcomings voiced by proud river runners and backpackers, often delivered with mild condescension (“I guess I can cancel my rafting permit for this summer”) or outright indignation (“Is nothing sacred?”). Jonathan Thompson, an editor at High Country News, invoked the cantankerous author Edward Abbey, who in the 1970s wrote, “The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. . . . To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me. That’s God’s job, not ours.” [Project leader for Google’s Grand Canyon mapping effort Karin] Tuxen-Bettman made a similar concession, pointing out that the map and its imagery were no substitute for the canyon itself. “It reflects what’s there at one moment of time,” she said, “but it does not replace it.”
The Dish 