One may argue that the most difficult aspect to notice is that which is all and ever present (the fish and water argument). Luckily, I’ve been living in big cities not long enough to run a risk of taking them that much for granted. Given my small town, small country background, the opposite argument (that, wiped clean by the excitement of novelty, my doors of perception let more rather than less big cityscape information in) makes more sense. At least to me because I constantly come across narratives about cities. How much of that is based on the urban as a growing focus of attention in social science, art, media, etc., generally, and how much is due to that unavoidable personal process which turns temporarily paying more attention into a more permanent attentional echo chamber of information consumption, is difficult to say. I would intuit a combination of both. Anyways, I hope that echo chamber serves my fancy well and is not too much of a perspectival monocle. Again I cannot say, but the below random selection of what I recently came across seems diverse enough. Continue reading →