Digital Walks as Attention and Experience Management

Digital environments such as locative gaming apps creates different spatial regimes that add to, enhance or may contest other physical ones. This presentation will explore how digital walks, in this context denoting physical walking supported and instructed by way of digital Scavenger apps, play out and what effects such instructions may have on why, how and where you walk. Digital walks are linked to heritage sites appearing as possible targets or posts. This is the case in Norway as elsewhere in the world and may potentially have an important role and impact on heritagisation processes. By directing and managing the user’s attention and experience of space and place the apps facilitate and may contribute to new sets of heritage topographies, lingering between the physical and the digital, the imagined and real, the tangible and intangible. In this presentation I will explore these perspectives by ways of a few examples.