This week when we talked about the “blue marble”, and how supposedly when we see pictures of the globe from outer space it usually shows North America and Europe, I remembered a quiz my roommate gave me about maps. The quiz was for her teaching class, and it was pretty simple. It had questions like, what is the biggest island in the world? How many continents are there? What direction does the Nile River flow? Like all her classmates, I thought the quiz seemed pretty simple. Then, we compared answers, and I realized there is not one correct answer to any of the questions.



All of my answers were based on my mental image of a map, the one in our geography and history books. But, I learned that there are many other versions of maps throughout the world. For example, the map viewed by Australians is similar to ours, but upside down. And as for knowing what the largest continent is, what is the definition of a continent? Are Asia and Europe separate continents? Or can they be grouped together since they are connected by land? All these notions we have about the way we see our world are shaped by the way it has been framed for us in our specific culture.



Throughout all the different cultures in the world, all are different, and all see images differently. Cultural meanings are inherent in viewing images such as maps, because we all come from different places on them. And I think that understanding these cultural gaps is important to realize that we can’t assume that we all view a certain picture in the same way, when some people might be looking at it upside-down.