Journal 10

While there are an extraordinaire amount of maps that a person could choose and point towards, especially for this journal entry. However, for me, it was a bit challenging, since I don’t interact with many maps, excluding google maps. For the sake of this exercise, I wanted to take a look and focus on a more simplistic map that most people have seen before, the map of the United state.

Now this map in particular not only showcases the entirety of the United State, but also major cities and roads that stretch all across the country, from the East coast to the West coast. From just glossing over the map quickly, and looking at it in a more factual terms. The most obvious thing that I can note about this map is that is written in english, so it’s very clear that this map is meant for English speakers or people who can read English. Even in areas of the map that aren’t apart of America, most notably Mexico, has it’s towns written in their English names. The time in which this map has been changed or updated is the renaming of the ‘The Gulf of Mexico’ to ‘The Gulf of America’, which is a clear indiction of this map being changed very recently, at least some time with the beginning of 2025. One thing that’s important to note, but something I can’t quite explain, is the colors of each state. Every single state within the United States boarder is shaded in one of 3 colors, peach, orange, and yellow. As far as I can tell, they are kind of just randomly placed in random states, however, no two state of the same color are touching one another. For example, Nevada is surround by 2 states that are colored in orange and peach, and 1 colored in green, but none that are colored in yellow. One other note is that while this color scheme may be random, the color for both Mexico and Canada are the same, which is some shade of gray, indicating that these parts of the world are not part of the United States.

I personally think that the change in the name of the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ is very telling of the times we are in right now, at least for how the US wants to be perceived as. For many countries who haven’t adopted this change, they think the change is rather pointless and continue to use ‘The Gulf of Mexico’ instead. It’s this renaming that show’s the intent of the US to be a bigger and more aware present, not just in a geological scale, but political and economical scale too, since a lot of the actives that is used and produced there involves the trade of fish, oil, and gas goods. Things that the US would like more control or say over potentially, with it being named under America rather than Mexico. Another thing to note is the amount of cities that are listed in the US compared to the one’s in listed in Mexico and Canada, or more accurately the lack of cities shown. The differences of cities, roads, and rivers, shown between each country shows a clear focus on the importance for the US over the other countries.