The following is excerpted from “A History of the World in 100 Objects” by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum. It was published in 2011.
“There’s a compelling, beguiling showbiz mythology of the modern big city – the energy and the abundance, the proximity to culture and power, the streets that just might be paved with gold. We’ve seen it and we’ve loved it, on stage and on screen.
“But we all know that in reality big cities are hard. They’re noisy, potentially violent and alarmingly anonymous. We sometimes just can’t cope with the sheer mass of people.
“And this, it seems, is not entirely surprising. Apparently, if you look at how many numbers we’re likely to store in our mobile phone, or how many names we’re likely to list on a social networking site, it’s rare even for city dwellers to exceed a couple of hundred.
“Social anthropologists delightedly point out that this is the size of the social group we would have had to handle in a large Stone Age village. According to them, we’re all trying to cope with modern big-city life equipped only with a Stone Age social brain. We all struggle with anonymity.”
