Paper Example on GPS: How the US DoD's Technology Became a Global Asset

Introduction

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a technology that is credited to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) was initially designed for US military functions. The rolling out for civilian use was made later after the U.S military employed in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan wars as a secondary objective (Hofmann-Wellenhof, 2012). However, the non-military application was restricted to a purposeful degraded subset of the signals broadcast. Nonetheless, use grew beyond the projected scope such as in transportation, construction, agriculture, aviation, business, and even in surveying. This paper therefore explores the implications associated with the locative media due to advent of GPS.

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The advent of satellite navigation was designed to determine the location of a target based on the position of a well-defined position (coordinates) of three objects closer to the destination. For a global navigation system, twenty-four constellation satellites orbit the earth for taking ranges of the objects. Its position is established from the transmitted signals with minimal error rates per meter. Distance between the subscriber and the satellites is determined from the time difference between the transmission and reception of signals. The GPS can locate the position of the user accurately in a three-dimensional instantaneously.

Digitization enabled the fitting of GPS on various electronic devices that are carried around by people and embedded systems on other gadgets, raising concerns about locating and being located. As a result, virtually anything can identify and be found (Hillukkala, 2016). The location data, such as navigation, tracking, and location, can be shared through various with GPS supported media including smartphones, have split from military to the consumer mainstream.

Awareness Technologies

There are awareness technologies such as sensors for determining and finding the geographical position of users, embedded devices and other radio terminals. These devices include GPS, Wi-Fi, enhanced observed time difference (E-OTD), and enhanced GPS. Augmented, hybrid, code space is used for location awareness technologies also.

Augmented reality (AR) applies the virtual reality with the ability to enable the sharing of images and locations with other users through social media from their current positions (Lee, 2012). The human interaction through the augmented space is the photography, social groups, radar application, and location through GPS. Augmentation is a real-time and happens within the context of where the user is located given that it is assisted by the GPS to pinpoint the location. Owing to its display on screens, glasses, smartphones and mobile devices of the GPS, technologies such as simulation localization and mapping, depth tracking, cameras and sensors, data about the user is collected used for processing (Papagiannakis, 2008).

Locative Media

The digitization era created links that identify people by a particular geographical location through applications and GPS which allows the coordinate positioning accessibility to mobile communication systems. The result of locative media is the mapping zones which holds a great interest to the artist, and researchers keen on creating software that facilitated the sharing of histories and community-based information (Pinder, 2013). Mobile gadgets continue to shape and modify everyday activities and experiences through the locative media platform. Personalized experiences and knowledge specific to the location of the user are easy to develop. Movements are visualized, images are tagged with the place, and sharing is made simple. Through sharing of personalized information, distribution, and accessing such information brings about the rewriting of sites.

Users are exposed to various ways of interacting and experiencing in public spaces such as the navigation of travelers that are traveling in unknown and unfamiliar territories, social radar for detecting and location the nearest friends or the potential flirt partners (Pinder, 2013). But the question becks, are the locative media provides platforms for social interaction and inclusion or the medium for social isolation?

Locative media having roots from the military initially designed for surveillance, tracking, detecting, and locating targets was left unmonitored, unfixed and taken for granted bringing its application to determine location to questioning with the possibility of being abused.

Misuse of GPS

GPS technology is pervasive and embedded in almost every technology including mobile phones, watches, vehicles, cameras, bags, and even pets. This enables the surveillance of people in their everyday life as they relay information about location continuously and instantaneously. Although it may be universal to argue the importance of tracking the whereabouts of a concerned partner of the site of a pet, misuse is also bound to happen. With the launching of satellites by the US military, it was later used for guiding missiles targeting the supposedly enemies and collecting the surveillance footage of their war opponents.

The accessibility of the GPS to the civilian and removal of the restricted application by the US troops brought about concern on the tracking and surveillance of people who become targets (Loyer, 2013). Their whereabouts are extracted without the consideration of the people's privacy, let alone consent. Consumers are also subject to tracking, surveillance, and profiling to track their consumption and purchase habits. Customers are thus served with customized services when they visit the shopping stores.

There is a need for a concerted effort to discuss the implications of state and corporate machinery to re-evaluate the location awareness that is consistent with a sincere transformation of capitalism, geopolitical and military uses. The GIS is a powerful tool that keeps its political and social roles secret, given the sensitivity information; it gathers from surveillance stands as a value-neutral platform (Ramasubramanian, 2010). The criticism directed to GIS to develop the political information and digital mapping for productivity other than manipulating location and identification that serve a particular ideology.

Artistic Work

Tracking involves the locating of a point from frame to frame in a sequence of series involving stabilization and monitoring of movements. This is especially useful for an accurate drawing of a map. The tracking of people concerning their locations explores the digital media that facilitates surveillance and control. Researchers took advantage of open mapping to produce non-copyrighted materials of cartography data. It is redrawing of places using mapping led to the designing of cities obtained from people relaying the signals all through the city. With such creativity, GPS became a tool for artistic work.

GPS is applied in determining the precise location of an object in real-time by the use of radio signals from the satellites. Critical phenomenon such as the crustal fractures, tectonic plates in motion, and earthquakes can be tracked and monitored. Precise measurements of their movements, causes, and magnitudes are crucial in determining their dynamics (Lowman, 2002). The application of GPS is accurate and economical. Moreover, the location technologies can be re-evaluated to establish the relationship between the virtual location and the actual location of the people. With the application of the GPS, positions are given in a form coordinates and also the history associated with the place bringing about the artistic nature of the practice.

Cartographic producers keen on producing virtual streets, lanes, or throughways that in reality, do not exist in the actual mappings. The cases of copyrights then arose in the event a rival company produces the same mappings with claims of copyright infringements. The strangest case is where the entire map is wrong with the companies claiming national and economic security (Pinder, 2013). This difference between the digital mapping and actual landscape is a case of ghostly slippage. The politics and geographies of places are interlinked when drawing up locations based in the remote control. This is infect reflected on how people interact through national production and trade.

Actions relating to the sharing of maps in websites, blogs, or through other media, ensuring map privacy is paramount to monitor the way users can access the location of an individual. Securing the layers of data uses the dataset private which is distinct from the map privacy.

Tracking is a concern where the security of the user is not a priority exposing them to unwarranted privacy risks and control (Burten, 2011). Some people, however, may agree to be tracked and surveyed by enabling their GPS devices to transmit signals for cartography development. The significance of being monitored should be based on awareness, purpose and consent since the subject will always be located in real-time.

Geo-mapping accuracy is boosted by the use of handheld electronic gadgets such as smartphones with GPS enabled. Smartphones contain chips that receive and process navigation signaled from the satellites especially from the US. Higher quality chips ensure accurate detection and high quality signal reception, autonomous function, and performance as well. A lot of mapping applications are available both for commercial and as a free-source and necessity for better performance is compatibility with the device being used (Pinder, 2013).

Surveying and mapping was the first beneficiary of GPS as a result of increased productivity and accuracy of data and reliability of the system. GPS based data is more reliable and accurate concerning the initial surveying for data acquisition.

Owing to the presence of GPS to the civilians, modernization has been launched by the addition of civil signal at L2 that facilitates a higher accuracy of detecting locations without the input of military message signals. A third signal is added at L5 that further enhances the accuracy of the navigator (Januszewski, 2007). Surveyors and mappers are therefore able to carry the GPS systems in their backpacks, embed in their vehicles to allow real-time and accurate data streaming

References

Burten, C. (2011). Unwarranted-Privacy in a Technological Age: The Fourth Amendment Difficulty in Protecting against Warrantless GPS Tracking and the Substantive Due Process and First Amendment Boost. S. Cal. Interdisc, 359.

Hillukkala, M. (2016). I want to know where my child is at all times'-field study of a location-aware safety service for schoolchildren. Behaviour & Information Technology. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144929X.2016.1201144Hofmann-Wellenhof. (2012). Global positioning system: theory and practice. Springer Science & Business Media.

Januszewski, J. (2007). Modernization of satellite navigation systems and their new maritime applications. TransNav, International Journal on Marine Navigation and Safety of Sea Transportation, 1.

Lee, K. (2012). Augmented reality in education and training. TechTrends, 56.

Lowman, P. D. (2002). Exploring space, exploring Earth: New understanding of the Earth from space research. Cambridge University Press.

Loyer, E. (2013). Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of Everyday Life. Canadian Journal of Communication, 420.

Papagiannakis, G. (2008). A survey of mobile and wireless technologies for augmented reality systems. Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 22....