The other day I realised that I still really don’t know London.

Dan and I had to get from Oxford Circus to Clerkenwell the other day. I’d been up there once before, so I was pretty sure how to get there. Farringdon tube, right? Either two changes or two stops north on the Bakerloo line and then along the Circle. Either way, it’d take forever. It was raining, too. And I’d managed to put a hole in my shoes.

Not so fast, says Dan; better to go along the Central Line to Chancery Lane. I thought he was mental, until we checked the maps on our phones.

I had no idea that Chancery Lane was that close to where we were going! I thought it was miles away. After all:

I’m not a Londoner, just a day-tripper, and my internal London is in the shape of the Tube map. The thing is, I know the Tube map’s about topology, not geography. I’ve seen Tom Carden’s stuff on Tube travel times. Still, I just knew Chancery Lane was nowhere near Farringdon, damn it.

In all the writing there’s been on networked urbanism recently, which is terrific and you should read it all, there’s been one thing which has been bothering me by its absence. We’re going to stick sensors in everything and garland cities with wireless, and then we’re going to shove all that data onto the Internet. (In case you wondered, that’s where we come in.)

But once we’ve got all that data, well: networked urbanism means, amongst other things, building visualizations of everything. Abstracted representations of partial recordings of the recent past. And, like the Tube map, if they’re any good than they’re going become part of us.

We’re pushing abstractions of abstractions of abstractions into peoples’ heads.

And, well, here’s what I’ve been worrying about: have we got a moral responsibility here? There’s no Hippocratic oath for informaticists — “First, do no memetic harm”. But if we’re building these cerebral prostheses for ourselves and for each other, then don’t we have a duty of care not to mess with how people perceive the city too badly? And how do we avoid doing that?

Or maybe it’s just me.