Reading Response #1

I listened to the full episode of “Mapping” from the radio program, This American Life. The episode was about five individuals who partake in the hobby of mapping but who all did it differently than each other. Each person had a different style of mapping the world, each one using one of the five senses; seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. The program first began with the story of sidewalks in New York City. The law states, in New York City, that if someone should trip, fall and hurt themselves over a crack in the sidewalk, they are not allowed to sue the city unless the city had already been told to fix the crack prior to the injury. A group of lawyers then decided to hire a mapping company to go out every year and chart every crack and bump in the city, a map of cracks in New York City.
The program then followed a man whose hobby was to map certain things in his neighborhood. He had mapped all of the lights in his neighborhood as well as every house that had Jack O’Lanterns on their porches during Halloween.
Then, shifting to hearing, we visited a man who mapped out all the ambient sounds in his life, he compared certain musical notes to certain emotions and thought about during what situations you might hear those noises. For instance, being stuck at work in a cubicle could be compared to hearing music that made you sad.
Smell was explored by visiting a man who mapped out his world by smell while also visiting Cyrano Sciences in Pasadena, California where researchers are attempting to create an electronic nose.
The program then visited a woman who mapped out her own body by the sense of touch as well as a man who revisited Los Angeles and created a map based on taste.
I thought the program was very interesting. It seems like it could be a very interesting and fun hobby especially the sight technique. Although that may be the least abstract technique of the above listed, I thought it was interesting and cool how he was able to compare different maps he made based on sight. He compared the Jack O’Lantern map with that of a map that indicated the houses of people who were mentioned in newspaper articles or who wrote letter to the editors and was able to find parallels between the two.