People get lost all the time. Usually, these bouts of disorientation end happily enough. A hiker backtracks to find a missed trail marker, or a driver rolls down a window to ask a pedestrian for directions to a certain street or landmark. However, every so often, people get utterly lost, so lost that they scramble their brains along with their bearings. I call this extreme version of getting lost “nature shock,” the title of my new book, and eight years ago, I set out to find the terribly lost in American history.
Over five centuries, North Americans traveled from relational space, where people navigated by their relationships to one another, to individual space, where people understood their position on Earth by the coordinates provided by mass media, transportation grids and commercial networks. By meeting distressed individuals teetering on the edges of the worlds they knew, I learned how people constructed their worlds and how these constructions changed over time. And in so doing, I stumbled upon the twisted route Americans followed to reach a moment when blue dots pulsating on miniature screens tell them where to go.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histo...ess-180975495/