人类总是会迷路。通常而言，那些有关迷路的故事会以喜剧收场。原路返回的徒步者找到了他错过的路标，或一位超市经理带着走丢的孩子在烘培区找到了心慌意乱的父母。然而，还有些时候，人们会彻底迷失，迷茫到把自己的智慧和行李都抛到九霄云外。我称这种极端的迷失境遇为“自然震荡”。九年之前，我开始在美国历史中寻找那些彻底迷失的人。通过研究那些遭到震荡的人，可以辨识出人类对自我、社会与身处环境的认识发生的源远流长又始终未能彻底完成的变迁。过去五个世纪中，北美人从在由彼此关系组成的联系空间（relational space）中旅行变为在个人空间（individual space）中旅行。在个人空间中，人们以大众媒体、交通道路、商业网络为坐标系，理解自身在地球上的位置。自然震荡揭示了那些个人空间中的幻象（人们自以为可以在这些脱离与其他人类联系的空间中获得解放）， 也照亮了那些联系空间深处的黑暗角落，在那里将人类联系在一起的往往是奴役与暴力。通过与那些心灰意冷、在他们认知中的世界边缘踽踽独行的人们相遇，我们得以了解人们如何建构他们的世界、这些建构如何随时间流逝发生变化。这些变化驱使着美国人走上一条蜿蜒的道路，最终只得让在小小屏幕上跃动的蓝点告诉他们该向何处前进。

Human beings get lost all the time. Usually, these bouts of disorientation end happily enough. A hiker backtracks to find a missed trail marker, or a store manager returns a wayward child to a distracted parent in the baking aisle. 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,” and nine years ago, I set out to find the terribly lost in American history. You can discern a long-brewing and incomplete shift in humans’ understanding of themselves, their societies, and their environments by pondering those who got shocked. 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. Nature shock exposed the illusions of individual space—that persons could liberate themselves in spaces outside of human connection—and nature shock illuminated the dark recesses of relational space, where human connections often meant slavery and violence. By meeting destressed 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 stumbled upon the twisted route Americans followed to reach a moment when blue dots pulsating on miniature screens tell them where to go.