The urban environment and industrial capitalism, in constant flux, required a new kind of observer prepared to handle increasing exchangeability, abstraction, and plurality in representation.    Crary explains how vision was reconstructed through the introduction of new technologies and changes in philosophical understandings, which influenced the work of physiologists.  Crary identifies the beginning of the modern reorganization of vision with Goethe’s Theory of Colors, which was the first philosophical work that paid close attention to the workings of the retinal afterimage.  The afterimage proved that ‘optical experience was produced by and within the subject’.  Following him Shopenhauer, "rejected any model of the observer as a passive receiver of sensation, and instead posed a subject that was both the site and producer of sensation."   In contrast to Enlightenment understanding, visual perception was not the direct reflection of an external reality.  Vision was corporialized in a way inconceivable in the 17th and 18th century.

Though Schivlebusch deals with the technological history of the railway, his concern is primarily with how the railway created a new consciousness.  He explains, "how the nineteenth century travelers gradually got accustomed to what at first seemed frightening:  the demolition of traditional time-space relationships and the dissolution of reality.  the travelers developed new modes of behavior and perceptions, forms in which the new experiential content extended itself."

The railway separated the viewer from the space of the objects he is seeing and in a railway car, the smells and sounds of the outside space could be experienced, only the visual.  Schivelbusch contrasts this experience with coach travel where the traveler fixes his gaze on the foreground and is part of the space he travels through.  "Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects, landscapes, etc,.  through the apparatus which moved him through the world.  The machine and the motion it created became integrated into his visual perception:  thus he could only see things in motion."

While the early and mid-nineteenth century middle-class held the belief that seeing was the way to understanding, new social and economic situations proved that visual perception was not reliable and that visual clues could not determine one’s character.   By the late 1850’s ladies journals began to explain that it was acceptable and perhaps good to conceal defects and explained.  “the larger value of polite social forms as masks and disguises."   New entertainment forms entered the parlor, which included illusions and plays, which made light of the pretensions of the middle-class.   By mid-century the bourgeoisie, “were learning to place confidence not in the sincere countenance but in the social mask; to trust not in simple dress but in elaborate disguise.”

Benjamin explains that, "With the close up, space expands:  with slow motion, movement is extended.  The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible though unclear:  it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject." Writing in the 1940's Benjamin was very interested in how new technologies were changing perceptions.  He believed that visual experience was historically constructed.  In "Art in the Age of Reproduction", he argues that reproduction disrupts authenticity and shifts the function of art from ritual to politics.  Furthermore, in contrast to theatre, film repositions the viewer as a critic.