memes

This is actually becoming a significant problem in some contexts. I train people in some wilderness first aid skills and also train the Burning Man community mediators / first responder volunteers. We're starting to get folks who volunteer for us, but are staggeringly bad at knowing how to navigate the world when GPS is unavailable or unreliable. Burning Man's Black Rock City is laid out like a clock face, with radial streets named for times on the clock and other streets running perpendicular to those named after letters (so an address would be something like "5:45 and G street"). In the last few years, we've been increasingly seeing people who want to volunteer to help folks, but struggle to navigate this very, very basic city grid even with the benefit of a map. It's not so much that they can't use a paper map--that is a problem, but very few people have ever been any good at orienteering without training--but rather that they're fundamentally just not used to the idea that you have to pay attention to where you are. GPS exists out there, but without specialized gear, it's not precise enough to really locate you on the city grid, and since the city shifts location in the Black Rock Desert every year, it's difficult to hard-code something like that with a specialized app or piece of tech. Map use is a trainable skill that we're used to incorporating into the curriculum, but the idea that you have to actually look at street signs and dedicate a portion of your brain to remembering your location, trajectory, and relative position has turned out to be extremely difficult to impart to people who have never had to do it. We've had to turn away otherwise very good volunteers because "paying attention to your position in space" turns out to be a skill that's very hard to train for in a limited time frame.