A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, p. 58.
I know I’m tilting at windmills but I also think this needs to be reiterated.
We know that an increasing number of private and public organizations are modeling us. Online tracking, connected devices, ghost profiles, cohort analyses… We are incompletely defined, wrongly (in both senses of the word) mapped.
What we still have to understand and assimilate in Popular Culture is the usefulness and use of these maps by and for those who design them. Because in the same way that a path indicated on a map becomes more frequented, and therefore more clearly marked on the territory than a non-mapped path, the aberrations of our models become, due to the manipulations of our publication timelines and filtered bubbles, our own mental pathways.