I remember being told this in high school and being totally confused. My teacher told us that a standard map, or even a globe, is inaccurate. She explained why but I didn’t understand. Why is this?
In: Technology
You can’t take a round map and make it a rectangle without squishing or stretching parts. This is fine, it’s not evil that it is that way.
But it is worth knowing about, it’s pretty obvious that “we” picked the standard map to be the one that centers on the western world and enhances it’s size. North America grows, Africa shrinks, Alaska gets to be bigger than India, europe gets to be giant, Etc. Like no one sat down and said “ha ha, lets make white dominated countries the biggest!” but it sort of did work out that way, the standard map is really focused on making america and europe bigger and more central to the map and putting some other countries into the “it’s fine if this ends up distorted, who cares” bucket. And it’s worth thinking about how that could be different and the map we happen to use is just one possible map.
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