The way we use maps is changing. The way we think of the city is changing. The way we think of, interact with and navigate the streets, alleys, boulevards, roads, parks, lanes, hills, cracks and gutters is going through a seismic shift, not because the landscape has changed, but because of little black rectangles in our pockets.

Apps such as Google Maps and Citymapper “smooth out the machine,” says Mike Duggan, researcher in Cultural Geography at Royal Holloway. Duggan has been researching how digital technologies change our experiences of everyday places, and one of the main things he’s noticed is the way new technology continues to smooth out the machine that billions of us navigate every day – the city.

“There’s a long history in ‘smoothing out the city’ via technology,” says Duggan. “What’s new is that these mobile technologies (ie smartphones) offer so much in one place - the palms of our hands - and this often seems like a revolution because we no longer have to go searching very far for information that makes life easier: we just reach into our pockets.”

Having a map in your pocket at all is relatively recent development. “In the medieval period right the way through to the 19th century, people could live perfectly happily in their locality without ever having knowledge of or care for the wider world,” explains Tom Harper, curator of antiquarian mapping at the British Library. As maps became cheaper to produce they became important public tools, able to take the mess of new urban metropolises and make them comprehensible. Pocket maps were designed to fit in gentlemen’s coat pockets, and this cheaper production signalled a revolution in mapping. As digital technology becomes more readily available the shifts are just as enormous.

“The other day I started writing a list of where location-based services could be used in the next 10 years, and within two minutes I quickly realised that the list could go on forever,” says Duggan. “People use them to find food, entertainment, post pictures, videos, for politics … There are maps in more and more aspects of our lives, and now it’s us generating the maps for ourselves. They’re becoming more personal than collective.”

“You are here” no longer needs to be said. We are by default the centre of the world. Our surroundings emanate from us, from a little blue dot that sits on the screen. It’s perhaps the single most important change in how we view the city. Around this blue dot stem not only cafes and banks but our own experiences, our pictures and tweets; past moments pinned to their places of origin. Harper explains that the earliest maps weren’t navigational plans but rather objects of symbolic pride. Sixteenth century rulers would hang maps in their palaces to represent the might and power of their cities. There are echoes of this in the way we are encouraged to spatially integrate our social personae, as if we too have ownership over the frothy coffee shops around us.

But is this sense of ownership illusory? Are we in fact losing grip of the city as a collective entity? Flicking through the pages of an atlas or struggling to unfold a tourist map gives a physical sense of scale: here is the city and the edges of the pages are its limits. Zoomed in on the user that scale is lost. We no longer pore through maps, we trace from A to B while the world outside the line of direction falls away. “Removing that need to find out where you are is huge,” says Duggan. “It’s an important generational change. I personally can’t use co-ordinates to find out where I am anymore; I could do when I was younger. Now I don’t have to so I don’t bother doing it and people brought up with these services rarely think about that process at all.”

As directions become more automatic, the barriers between navigating real and virtual cities are becoming thinner. Whether it’s a case of art imitating life or life imitating art, maps in games have changed alongside their real-world counterparts. Ten years ago, games would come with paper foldout maps but navigating the world of a modern game like Skyrim or GTA V is as simple as following lines on the mini-map or walking towards waypoint markers projected on the horizon. These immersive techniques are slipping into the real world. Google’s turn-by-turn navigation software, for example, lets you plug in a pair of headphones for direction. Using it is a strange experience. As you approach an intersection and the robotic voice permeates the personal bubble normally reserved for music and radio chatter the open city instantly becomes reduced to a corridor. It feels like a game.

“This restrictive feel ties in very strongly to maps produced in the 17th century by John Ogilby,” Harper points out. “They’re the first maps to focus on the roads, called strip maps. They take the road as a series of strips. All you saw on the map was the road. Nothing on either side was of importance unless it was a feature to help you navigate. It’s an incredibly narrow corridor of the world, very claustrophobic.”

If the past few years have seen maps narrow their attention to the individual’s position, the next few could see maps narrow their sights further in on the individual’s own point of view. With the advent of Google glass, it’s easy to imagine a yellow path projected from King’s Cross to Trafalgar Square, mentally reducing the space between the two places into one of Ogilby’s maps; an efficient path from here to there, but one which loses the sense of the city as a whole.

So it’s only natural to expect a reaction. While the 19th century saw the rise of the urban map, it also saw the rise of the urban drifter. A mapper and an anti-mapper, the flaneur would explore the city in order to experience it, leaving him or herself open to chance. In the face of greater prescription of movement, the idea of drifting through the city may witness a revival. It already has, to some extent, in the virtual world of games.

In the end, maps are empty. For the poet Charles Baudelaire, the importance of a city wasn’t in the structures themselves but the people who fill them. “The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy,” he wrote in The Painter of Modern Life in 1863. While there may be a whole new reservoir of electricity in my phone battery, it’s still nothing compared to the energy of a surging crowd. And while we may be encouraged to chart our pictures and words to maps, actual memories are a lot harder to pin down. People, and memories of people, are harder things to map than streets and alleys.