Volume 22, Issue 1, Spring 2025
L. Brooke Rudow
Pages 103-122
https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil202577149
Losing Trace
From Digital Technology to Dancing in Place
Drawing on Forrest Clingerman¡¯s work in environmental hermeneutics, I explore the technological mediation of nature apps and social media, particularly as they shape experiences of place and memory. I argue that in significantly undermining one¡¯s capacity to experience the natural environment aesthetically, one¡¯s memory of place is similarly undermined. Losing this trace of place in memory, one¡¯s sense of being in the world is transformed. That is, by using digital technologies to navigate nature, we shift modalities from aesthetic engagement to displacement, or in Tim Ingold¡¯s words, from ¡°wayfaring¡± to ¡°transport.¡± In the final section, I suggest a shift to dancing in nature as a means by which to recapture an aesthetics of place.