The imagined viewpoint is that associated with the observer's subjective experience from a first-person perspective rather than observing their own movements from an external perspective, or observing someone else's movements.
But both schools have spent more time theorizing than observing gossipers in their natural habitats.
It's less about understanding the butterfly effect than observing some urban moths flitting around a guttering candle.
Born of frustration, that energy now defines his style, which offers up an edgy, visceral atmosphere rather than observing in a cool, detached manner.
It takes more than observing a Martin Luther King Jr holiday and electing a black president to unwind such deepseated bigotry.
She has three children and, presumably, feels setting eyes on them more vital than observing another regional CEO belching his way through boeuf en croute.
But there is far more to the debate about how old cars should be preserved than observing stereotyped national differences.First, a sense of history.
More familiar with a milieu in which satisfying needs is of more urgent concern than observing social norms, he provides the unstable element in the delicate psychological balance established in the barracks.
But observing human chromosomes under the microscope had always been more difficult than observing those of other species, and scientists had long assumed that chromosomes normally numbered 48 in each body cell.
But he concedes that the darkness his work taps into is "the same stuff that people who write autobiographically are drawing on, except that I'm only sensing the connections rather than observing them".
There is, perhaps, some consolation for local audiences in feeling that London is once again the hub of the Empire and that they are at the centre of the apocalypse, rather than observing it from the periphery.
