When Will The Bikes Start To Blend In?

I was trying to cross 3rd Street yesterday when some jackass transportation neophyte nearly ran me over due to the fact that he was paying more attention to the way he was pedaling and trying to adjust his seat while riding than to what was in front of his face. In the end we were both fine and the collision was barely worth remarking upon except it got me to thinking, how long before we stop seeing the CitiBikes? I mean, of course the CitiBikes will be with us forever now, but at a certain point — and we won’t even know when it happens, because not knowing when it happens is the whole how of these things coming to be — we will no longer “see” them in the sense of them being something different and distinctive; they will simply be more visual noise to avoid (and to especially avoid if they are being driven by the kind of wheel-wielding idiot who almost knocked me down around 5:15 yesterday) and not something we process as “new blue bikes” or whatever. I have a theory that because of The Fast-Paced World In Which We Live and the Constant Barrage Of Fresh Information To Which We Are Subjected we are all processing new things with considerably more celerity than we used to, so whereas once it would take a really long time before we stopped individually classifying things as, say, cerulean death chariots, nowadays the gap between novelty and invisibility is so slight as to be almost imperceptible. I think this is particularly true of visual material; things that are gimmicky or weird for attention’s sake don’t shock the same way that they used to; most times you don’t even know they’re there. I don’t know where it’s going to lead us a society, but I don’t think it’s anywhere good. Thank God I’ll be dead before the bill comes due. Particularly if that schmuck on two wheels comes back to finish the job. [Via]