People believe that escalators provide a more attractive, convenient, and physically less-demanding pedestrian access from one place to another. However, it does not mean all of us have to like them. Escalators do not only affect our perception of speed, but the most important concern is that this urban object also influences our social relationships and human communication. Under the transmission of this urban object, we are treated as components (a what), rather than human beings (a who). Thus, this article discusses how modernist thinking affects how we see this object and ourselves, and examines the relative worth of it, in relation to the social loss incurred in the present or future. This article also discusses how its presence in many of the daily settings of urban life affects the culture, meaning and quality of life.
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