The Paris arcades were a place that consisted of both market exchange and entertainment.  This 'world in miniature' was used by Benjamin to symbolized a particularly new brand of mercantile capitalism experienced by a mobilized urban spectator.  The embodiment of this new experience is represented by Baudelaie’s flanuer, a new social type that thrived on the anonymity of the urban environment, scanning a multitude of images, intoxicated by the crowd, and taking in the ‘thousand natural shocks’ provided by the arcades.

In the new wide paved streets  of Paris the flanuer was at home.  Benjamin explains that the arcades acted as both exterior and interior for him.  "The street becomes the dwelling place for the flaneur, he is as much at home among house facades as a citizen is within his four walls.  To him a shiny enameled shop sign is a least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his living room."    Benjamin surmises that the excitement of the flanuer, caught in the phantasmagorias of the modern city, is related to a new way of seeing. “The daily sight of a lively crowd may once have constituted a spectacle to which ones eyes had to adapt at first.  On the basis of this assumption, one may assume that once the eyes mastered the task they welcomed opportunities to test their newly acquired faculties.”  

The confidence man threatened young men coming to the cities susceptible to being seduced into their ranks.  “The proliferation of moveable wealth, especially negotiable paper, in the early nineteenth century, and the growing confusion and anonymity of urban living, had made possible for the first time a wide variety of swindles, frauds, forgeries, counterfeiting activities, and other confidence games.”   For the first time people had to be highly wary of strangers and monetary transactions.  They viewed and presented this new situation with fear and disgust.  Haltunnen explains, "the antebellum city was presented as the natural habitat of hypocrisy and deceit, ‘the theatre of humbugs,’ where righteous men deplored ‘the unclean appetites that are slicked over with fashion, and the beastlinesss that assumes the name of ‘gentleman.’”

The middle class responded with new behavioral standards and ways of identifying strangers.  “In a theory that may be called the sentimental typology of conduct, they asserted that all aspects of manner and appearance were visible signs of inner moral qualities.”   They believed that a person’s character could be seen in their outward appearance.  That a countenance revealed the true nature of a person, and in advice manuals encouraged young men to cultivate ‘transparency of character.’  The also warned against joining the ranks of the confidence man, who represented a static class and indeterminate morality.  “The confidence man represented the new urbanite who could sever the connection between inner character and outward appearances by consciously manipulating the impression he made on others.”   But as Halttunen points out there is a significant amount of tension in advice manuals since the potential reader was “himself a marginal man in passage from one social state to another.”