Addressing Absence: Digital Inclusion and Google Maps' Plus Codes Project

In this contribution, I consider the social implications of an ongoing Google Maps initiative titled the Google Plus Codes project to think critically about “digital inclusion” in the context of data colonialism. The Plus Codes project is Google Maps’ on-going practice of spatial data collection that “gives addresses” to those who “don’t have an address” (Google, n.d). Through Plus Codes, Google Maps assigns “digitally sourced addresses” to individual people, homes, or businesses around the world. Plus Codes’ addresses are based on Google’s propriety alphanumeric locating system that reindexes geographic lines of latitude and longitude, narrowed to a 3mx3m zone. For Google, creating location codes are a means to access “banking and emergency services, receive personal mail and deliveries, and help people find and patronize their businesses” (Google, n.d.). As such, we can see how Google Maps’ Plus Codes project positions absence from spatial ordering systems as an opportunity to be included in Google’s index of spatial data. Yet, despite their projected reach, Plus Codes are only visible and traceable through Google Maps platform. In this paper, I examine the discursive framework of the Plus Codes project to think about how opaque systems of data collection are often mobilized as a “mechanism for socio-economic inclusion” (Luque-Ayala & Neves Maia, 2019). Applying a framework of critical data studies and anti-colonial digital humanities (Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Rissam, 2018), I consider how Plus Codes centralizes Google Maps as a core infrastructure of capital flows by giving people addresses that are only legible to the Google Maps’ platform. Google promotes these codes as open source and free to use globally, while at the same time has targeted NGO’s in The Gambia, Kenya, India, and South Africa to help facilitate the expansion of the Google Maps project (Oyedemi, 2021). Through an examination of Google’s Plus Codes projects, this paper considers the hidden costs of data inclusion and data legibility tactics (Mervyn, Simon, & Allen, 2014; Milan & Treré, 2019; Gangadharan, 2017) when entangled in systems of digital coloniality and imperialist capitalism (Oyedemi, 2021). In this sense, my approach to the ‘untold story’ is twofold— as both a method for interrogating the hidden processes that undergird so-called digital inclusion projects and a site of critiquing who and what is instrumentalized as ‘untold’ in Google’s data collection projects. References Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject. Television & New Media, 20(4), 336–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632 Gangadharan, S. P. (2017). The downside of digital inclusion: Expectations and experiences of privacy and surveillance among marginal Internet users. New Media & Society, 19(4), 597–615. doi:10.1177/1461444815614053 Google Maps (n.d.) Plus Codes. https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ Luque-Ayala, A., & Neves Maia, F. (2019). Digital territories: Google maps as a political technique in the re-making of urban informality. Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space, 37(3), 449-467. Mervyn, K., Simon, A., Allen, D.K. (2014). Digital inclusion and social inclusion: a tale of two cities. Information Communication and Society, 17(9), pp. 1086-1104 Milan, Stefania, Treré, Emiliano. 2019. “Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism.” Television & New Media 20(4): 319–35 Oyedemi, T.D. (2021) Digital coloniality and ‘Next Billion Users’: the political economy of Google Station in Nigeria, Information, Communication & Society, 24(3), 329-343, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1804982 Roopika R. (2018). New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press