A new golden age of cartography has suddenly dawned, everywhere. We can all be map-makers now, navigating across a landscape of ideas that the cartographers of the past could never have imagined.

Maps were once the preserve of an elite, an expression of power, control and, latterly, of minute scientific measurement. Today map-making has been democratised by the internet, where digital technology is spawning an astonishing array of maps, reflecting an infinite variety of interests and concerns, some beautiful, some political and some extremely odd.

If the Budget has made you feel gloomy, you can log on to a map that will tell you just how depressed you and the rest of the world are feeling. For more than two years, the makers of wefeelfine.org have harvested feelings from a wide variety of personal blogs and then projected these on to the globe. How happy are they in Happy Valley? How grim is Grimsby? You can find out.

Where maps once described mountains, forests and rivers, now they depict the contours of human existence from quite different perspectives: maps showing the incidence of UFOs, speed cameras or the density of doctors in any part of the world. A remarkable new map reflects global telephone usage as it happens, starkly illustrating the technological gap between, say, New York and Nairobi.

Almost any measurable human activity can be projected, using a computer “mash-up”: a map of New Jersey based on episodes of The Sopranos; the spread of graffiti in a single town; the progress of the Tour de France; traffic accidents; the CO2 emissions for any given flight; or exactly how many people have been gored in the annual Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.

A new online map called whoissick.org allows American hypochondriacs to track who is ill with what and where at any given moment: in Los Angeles yesterday there was a nasty cough going about, but in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, half of those reporting their symptoms to the site claimed to have a stomach ache. A hilarious disclaimer adds: “whoissick is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice.”

The new generation of amateur map-makers are doing for the traditional atlas what Wikipedia has already done to the encyclopaedia, adding layer upon layer of new information, some that is fascinating and useful, much that is pointless and misleading, and almost all from a distinctly personal perspective.

The new digital geography marks a return to an earlier form of cartography, when maps were designed to reveal the world through a particular prism. The earliest maps each told a story framed by politics, culture and belief. Ancient Greeks painted maps depicting unknown lands and strange creatures beyond the known world. Early Christian maps placed Jerusalem at the middle of the world. British imperial maps showed the great advance of pink colonialism spreading outwards from our tiny islands at the centre.

Maps were used to settle scores and score points, just as they are today. When Jesuit map-makers drew up a chart of the Moon's surface in 1651, craters named after heretical scientists such as Copernicus and Galileo were dumped in the Sea of Storms, while more acceptable thinkers were allowed to float in the Sea of Tranquillity. British maps of America before the Revolution showed the states extending endlessly westward, to reflect the King's dominion over the continent's as yet unmapped interior.

The 19th century heralded a more scientific approach to map-making; much of the artistry and symbolism was stripped away in an attempt to create a two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional reality. Maps became much more accurate, but less imaginative and culturally revealing.

The boom in amateur mapping, by contrast, marks a return to the earlier way of imagining the world when maps were used to tell stories and impose ideas, to interpret the world and not simply to describe its physical character. New maps showing how to avoid surveillance cameras, or the routes taken by CIA planes carrying terrorist suspects on “extraordinary rendition”, are political statements rather than geographical descriptions.

The earliest maps were also philosophical guides. They showed what was important and what was peripheral and what might be imagined beyond the edges of the known. A stunning tapestry map of the Midlands made around the time of Shakespeare and recently rediscovered, depicts forests, churches and the houses of the most powerful families, yet not a single road. It does not purport to show a physical landscape, but a mental one.

Maps have always tried to show where we are, literally or philosophically. The explosion of online mapping, however, offers something even broader: a set of maps that combine to express individual personality.

Oscar Wilde wrote that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.”

If Utopia means knowing where you fit in your own world - knowing how many UFOs hover above you, how much graffiti has appeared overnight, how happy your next-door neighbour is and whether he is likely to have picked up anything contagious - then humanity may finally have a map showing how to get there.

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