Digital Blocking as Visual Control: Revisiting Simmel’s Blasé Attitude and Goffman’s Civil Inattention in Social Media

PurposeThis paper considers the implications of not knowing – hypocognition – the lack of a cognitive or linguistic representation of a concept, algorithms, held by librarians responsible for programs of information literacy in universities in NSW, Australia.Design/methodology/approachA practice-based study of university librarians and their role in the development of algorithmic literacy, using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, showed that they had limited socio-technical knowledge of algorithms.FindingsNot knowing led most participants to anthropomorphise algorithms, including those found in search engines such as Google, sometimes explaining them as something mysterious, although they were aware that the algorithms were gathering data about them and their online interactions. Nonetheless, they delegated responsibility for online activities. These online interactions were not presented in system terms, but often could be interpreted as examples of Goffman’s civil inattention, a social norm used in interactions with strangers, such as fellow passengers. Such an understanding prevented the development of robust algorithmic literacy.Social implicationsWith technologies disrupting social norms, algorithms cannot be considered strangers who understand such civility; instead, metaphorically and practically, they rudely rummage through wallets and phones. Acknowledging the implications of the reliance on socio-cultural understandings of algorithms and their anthropomorphic representations for explaining online system-based interactions can present new ways for developing algorithmic literacy.Originality/valueThis study suggests that the links between hypocognition and the anthropomorphising of algorithms can undermine the development of knowledge and skills in information and digital literacies.

As described by early sociological research (Goffman, 1963, Behavior in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings), a typical behavioural pattern in public encounters between strangers is so-called Civil Inattention (CI). CI describes a ritual of politely communicating having noticed the other while assuring non-communication intentions. A typical example of showing CI is initially looking at the other person but then quickly averting the gaze. As argued earlier, CI fulfils a central role in the smooth functioning of a society. Also, CI gains new relevance in the digital era, in particular regarding privacy needs. Still, previous research on CI often remained on a theoretical or descriptive level, and its psychological functions have not been explored systematically. As an advancement, our study provides a deeper understanding of CI, exploring individual narratives, relevant psychological needs, and contextual factors. We conducted a qualitative interview study (N = 25) followed by an experimental online study (N = 353) with a 2 (presence of CI) × 2 (physical distance) mixed design. It shows that CI adds to well-being and specifically addresses needs for relatedness, security, and autonomy. However, though Study 1 suggested physical distance as a relevant contextual factor, the present experimental manipulation in Study 2 did not show significant effects.

This article presents a theoretical argument for examining the previously unexamined interface between the strong program in cultural sociology ethnomethodology/conversation analysis (EMCA). While these two approaches have radically different theoretical and empirical commitments, they nonetheless share a common root in Durkheim's sociology, specifically with regard to the centrality of solidarity, ritual, and morality to collective life. Similarly rooted in Durkheim, Goffman's theory of interaction ritual provides an analytic pivot between EMCA and the strong program. The broader theoretical argument is illustrated using data from interviews with adults about their most recent encounter with a rude strangers in public space, which are here treated a breaches of the interaction ritual of civil inattention. Members readily draw on the specifics of a particular stranger interaction gone awry to reflect on the nature of life in public and to expound on their understandings of the ethics of face-to-face interaction and everyday morality more generally. Where EMCA focuses on the discoverability of the organizational features of everyday interaction, the position developed here is concerned with the organization of members' interpretations of everyday interaction. While centered on specific kinds of interactional breaches, by finding common ground between EMCA and cultural sociology, the argument advances a potentially more broadly applicable approach that treats everyday encounters as morally meaningful and everyday lifeworlds as moral landscapes. Developing a comprehensive understanding of copresent interaction as a basic building block of society requires attention to both the organizational dynamics of copresent encounters and to the interpretive resources that ordinary members use to account for and justify their own and others' conduct.

The article employs ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA) and experimental video analysis to scrutinize the gaze behavior of urban passersby. We operationalize Goffman's concept of civil inattention to make it an empirical research object with defined boundaries. Video analysis enabled measurement of gaze lengths to establish measures for “normal” gazes within civil inattention and to account for their breaches. We also studied the dependence of gazing behavior on the recipient's social appearance by comparing the unmarked condition, the experimenter wearing casual, indistinctive clothes, to marked conditions, the experimenter wearing either a distinct sunhat or an abaya and niqab. The breaches of civil inattention toward marked gaze recipients were 10-fold compared to unmarked recipients. Furthermore, the analysis points out the commonality of hitherto unknown micro gazes and multiple gazes. Together the findings suggest the existence of subconscious monitoring beneath the public social order, which pre-structures interaction order, and indicates that stigmatization is a source for relational segregation.

The article provides an analysis of the category «blasé attitude»inferred by G.Simmel as a specific feature of the mental and social life of big cities. The study deals with the sources of the formation of blasé attitude and its key aspects as well as the transformation of the blasé attitude mechanism and the use in different «points»of social space, including in cyberenvironment. In addition, the «blasé attitude trap»is described, which is when the efforts expended in order to reduce nervous tension do not lead to the desired result and can even increase the intellectual load. The paper separately examines changes in the mechanism of blasé at-titude under lockdown and self-isolation of the population of big cities during the COVID-19 pandemic, characterized by the possibilities of using urban environment and its economic and socio-cultural infrastruc-ture being significantly reduced or requiring that a person literally let the space of the city into their own home. The latter leads to the search for ways of reducing the heterotopicity of space, to a focus on the pro-duction of counteracting factors and the use of available physical constraints. The examples considered in the paper show the transformation of not only everyday life but also the practices of maintaining the usual way of building relationships with Others in changing circumstances. The modern city is described through such categories as «flânerie»and «civil inattention», which, in combination with «blasé attitude», allow us to demonstrate the transformation of everyday practices of the inhabitants of a big city. Citizens seek to re-duce the risks of digitalization by finding ways to preserve the rules of the functioning of social systems and fix the boundaries of their operation, even if the boundaries are violated or it is impossible to separate them by time spent on daily movements. Blasé attitude is not only a mechanism for separating from some and creating a connection with others. It is the aspect of conscious acceptance that allows one to maintain a socially approved focus of attention in the performance of certain social roles.

<i>Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons</i>. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2021. Pp. 317.

The article presents an analytical concept, the Constitution of Accessibility through Meaning of Public Places (CAMPP) model. The CAMPP model distinguishes different manifestations of public places according to how they facilitate and restrict communication between urbanites. It describes public places along two analytical dimensions: their degree of perceived accessibility and the elaboration of knowledge necessary to participate in place-related activities. Three patterns of communicative interaction result from these dimensions: civil inattention, small talk, and sociability. We employ the CAMPP model as an analytical tool to investigate how digital annotations affect communicative patterns and perceptions of accessibility of public places. Based on empirical observations and interviews with users of smartphone apps that provide digital annotations, such as Foursquare City Guide, we observe that digital annotations tend to reflect and reinforce existing patterns of communication and rarely evoke changes in the perceived accessibility of public places.

ABSTRACTMultispecies ethnographic projects are venturing “beyond the human” (Kohn 2013), but how far can they go and remain anthropological? The answer depends on whether such projects align with the surge of ethological research on animal cultures. Based on my fieldwork on wild horses in Galicia, Spain, I make a case for an ethologically informed ethnography that extends cultural analysis to other social species. In this project, I used ethological techniques of direct observation but analyzed the results using Erving Goffman's concepts of face, footing, and civil inattention. My analysis inverts Clifford Geertz's classic study of the Balinese cockfight by making horse sociality the center of analysis, rather than regarding these animals as representations of human status concerns. I argue that this approach can be usefully applied across the range of taxa that evince culture, particularly those caught up in conservation efforts. In developing this claim, I draw on ethnoprimatologists’ efforts to synthesize multispecies ethnography with ethological methods and perspectives. [multispecies ethnography, animal cultures, ethology]

BackgroundInternationally, women report challenges breastfeeding in public spaces. This study aimed to investigate the social-spatial aspects of public spaces in one UK city, Cardiff, in order to suggest possible barriers and facilitators to breastfeeding in public spaces.MethodsThe study observation location guide prioritised places that had been reported as hostile to breastfeeding or breastfeeding friendly in the existing literature. Data were collected between April and September 2018 at various times of day, in several areas of the city, and included transport (n = 4), transport hubs (n = 3), high streets (n = 4), cafes (n = 2), a large city centre shopping complex, comprising of three joined shopping malls and a large city centre department store containing a third café. Low inference field notes were written on an encrypted smart phone and expanded soon after. Data were analysed thematically using deductive codes based on the observation schedule. Additional inductive codes relating to places were added.ResultsOverall, public transport and the city centre were inhospitable environments for those who might need to breastfeed, and even more so for those who need to express breastmilk. The core barriers and facilitators across locations were the availability of appropriate seating coupled with either high privacy or politely unimposing strangers (civil inattention). The one variation to this model arose from the department store café, where civil inattention was not performed and there was low privacy, but breastfeeding occurred anyway.ConclusionsThis research highlights the physical and social barriers to breastfeeding within one urban city centre in the UK and its associated transport links. It is clear that there is an urgent need for change in urban city centres and public transport if countries are to meet their aims in relation to increasing breastfeeding rates. Interventions will need to be multifaceted, accounting for social norms relating to infant feeding as well as changes to the physical environment, policy and potentially legal change. Further research should be undertaken in other countries to examine the extent to which hostile environments exist, and if correcting these could facilitate breastfeeding and reduce gender-based violence.

In the context of increasing appeals to informal care in Western welfare state policies, questions concerning urban sociality acquire new significance. This paper aims to contribute to the emergent thinking on ‘urban care’ by situating it in policy debates concerning care responsibilities between citizens. We used small-scale focus groups among urban residents in The Hague (the Netherlands) to inquire into the accounts urbanites give of engaging or not engaging with perceived care needs of a stranger. Informed by Goffman’s ‘civil inattention’, we found that accounts of non-engagement highlight urbanites’ orientation towards maintaining friendly social interactions in the face of strange or worrisome situations. Urbanites feel that they should respect people’s choices even if these might hurt them. They fear that interference might be humiliating and they attribute to themselves the task of sticking to normality, while family members, friends or professionals might take on the task to intervene. This careful non-engagement, contrasted with long-standing accounts of urban indifference, enhances our understanding of urban care.

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how new networked technologies, such as facial recognition (FR), challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public.

Everyday surveillance work is increasingly performed by non-human algorithms. These entities can be conceptualised as machinic flâneurs that engage in distanciated flânerie: subjecting urban flows to a dispassionate, calculative and expansive gaze. This paper provides some theoretical reflections on the nascent forms of algorithmic practice materialising in two Australian cities, and some of their implications for urban relations and social justice. It looks at the idealisation – and operational black boxing – of automated watching programs, before considering their impacts on notions such as ‘the right to the city’ and ‘the right to the face’. It will argue that the turn to facial recognition software for the purposes of automating urban governance reconstitutes the meanings and phenomenology of the face. In particular, the fleshly and communicative physicality of the face is reduced to a measurable object that can be identified by a virtualised referent and then consequently tracked. Moreover, the asymmetrical and faceless nature of these machinic programs of recognition unsettles conventional notions of civil inattention and bodily sovereignty, and the prioritisation given to pattern recognition renders them amenable to ideas/ideals from phrenology and physiognomy. In this way, algorithmic governance may generate not only forms of facial vulnerability and estrangement, but also facial artifice, where individuals come to develop tacit and artful ways of de-facing and re-facing in order to subvert the processes of recognition which leverage these modes of biopower. Thus, the datafication of urban governance gives rise to a dynamic biopolitics of the face.

This article presents an in-depth analysis of women’s experiences of sexual harassment in public transport based on 29 qualitative interviews with victims on the London Underground. The article draws on mobility studies to develop an innovative theoretical framework and identifies three key features of experiences of sexual harassment in this space. First, the rhythms of the city (i.e. rush hours and night time) and the Underground facilitated and concealed different forms of sexual harassment. Second, women frequently did not respond to sexual harassment due to respecting the urban civil inattention prevailing on the tube, accentuated by unwillingness to disrupt their fellow passengers’ and their own urban trajectories. Third, the transitory nature of the Underground created a situation in which women barely fully registered harassment before it had passed, anticipated it to be over quickly and meant that the perpetrators could disappear into the network. The article suggests that these characteristics of sexual harassment in public transport account for its endemic and underreported nature and offers analytical insights for research on sexual harassment in different context and on different crimes in transport environments.

The article is based on disability geography and draws on the social-geographic conception of relational space, which is perceived as being constantly created, never finished, heterogeneous, and embodied, and not a space that is given and everywhere the same. It offers a specific way of linking the discursive and material dimensions of disability, which intersect in the concept of social space, and refers to Lefebvre's trialectics of production - spatial practices, the representation of space, and spaces of representations. To analyse the mutual production of social space and social bodies, we use Goffman's concept of civil inattention. We ask how such social practices as gazing, addressing, asking, or dodging that co-create the social space of electric wheelchair users influence their movement through material space, and through the spatial reactions of wheelchair users responding to unwanted attention we trace the homogenisation and differentiation of space. The text is based on a long-term study (2010-2018) of the temporal/spatial behaviour of five electric wheelchair users (four men and one woman) diagnosed with muscular dystrophy who live in the City of Brno.

Everyday surveillance work is increasingly performed by non-human algorithms. These entities can be conceptualized as machinic flâneurs that engage in distanciated flânerie: subjecting urban flows to a dispassionate, calculative and expansive gaze. This paper provides some theoretical reflections on the nascent forms of algorithmic practice materializing in the Australian cities of Darwin and Perth, and some of their implications for urban relations and social justice. It looks at the idealization – and operational black boxing – of automated watching programs, before considering their impacts on notions such as ‘the right to the city’ and ‘the right to the face’. It will argue that the turn to facial recognition software for the purposes of automating urban governance reconstitutes the meanings and phenomenology of the face. In particular, the fleshly and communicative physicality of the face is reduced to a measurable object that can be identified by a virtualised referent and then consequently tracked. Moreover, the asymmetrical and faceless nature of these machinic programs of recognition unsettles conventional notions of civil inattention and bodily sovereignty, and the prioritization given to pattern recognition renders them amenable to ideas/ideals from phrenology and physiognomy. In this way, algorithmic governance may generate not only forms of facial vulnerability and estrangement, but also facial artifice, where individuals come to develop tacit and artful ways of de-facing and re-facing in order to subvert the processes of recognition which leverage these modes of bio-power. Thus, the datafication of urban governance gives rise to a dynamic bio-politics of the face.

It is a philosophical truism that we must think of others as moral agents, not merely as causal or statistical objects. But why? I argue that this follows from the best resolution of an antinomy between our experience of morality as necessarily binding on the will and our knowledge that all moral beliefs originate in contingent histories. We can address this antinomy only by understanding moral deliberation via interpersonal relationships, which simultaneously vindicate and constrains morality’s bind on the will. This means that moral agency is fundamentally social. I model an attitude toward our causal nature on sociologist Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘civil inattention’; our social practice of agency requires that we give minimal attention to the contingent origins of moral judgments in ourselves and others. Understood this way, seeing ourselves as moral agents requires avoiding appeal to causal aetiology to settle substantive moral disagreement.

Abstract Most encounters between strangers in urban public spaces involve the ritual of civil inattention (Goffman 1963). Generalized diffusion of this ritual upholds the urban interaction order. This article outlines a typology of infractions of the ritual of civil inattention, and focuses on two types: uncivil attention and uncivil inattention. Drawing on interviews (n = 326) about participants’ most recent encounter with a rude stranger in urban public space gathered by the Researching Incivilities in Everyday Life (RIEL) Project, variations between verbally, physically, and gesturally initiated incivilities are examined. Data suggests a correlation between types of initiating move and subsequent verbal exchange. Analysis demonstrates the value of ritual framing for understanding interactional conflict between strangers, and indicates that the broader concept of incivility can supplement and extend existing impoliteness research by encompassing both linguistic and non-linguistic forms of interactional conflict.

ABSTRACT This essay examines the 2011 Moving Words public poetry campaign in Singapore where poems were displayed in many train stations of the Mass Rapid Transit rail system. It also discusses the poetry anthology, Moving Words, containing poems submitted by members of the public as part of the campaign. While existing studies of Singaporean literature and culture discuss urban space, architecture, and roadways as significant literary tropes, no study of the Mass Rapid Transit’s role and representation in poetry exists. In contrast to the Singaporean state’s promotion of neoliberal work-driven time-discipline and lifestyles, the Moving Words poems imagine an affective and temporal sphere of social relations that is more capacious and relational. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of distraction and socio-cultural studies of urban life and public transit, I analyse the poems by showing how their form and content appropriate the mechanical and regulated spaces of train stations and carriages to transcend civil inattention and explore alternative temporal rhythms and emotional states. Disrupting the calibrated coercion of Singaporeans as docile passengers and efficient workers, the poems encourage readers to imagine relationships with each other and with the country’s past and future that exceed neoliberalism’s relentless focus on the present and productivity.

Abstract Treating uncivil encounters as breaches of the ritual contract of civil inattention (Goffman 1963), this article connects ritualized interaction between strangers in everyday life and the production and maintenance of moral order more generally. The ongoing enactment of the ritual of civil inattention maintains and characterizes the particular kind of moral order that strangers collectively produce in urban public spaces.Drawing on select empirical materials – from unsolicited commentary to queue-jumping – gathered under the auspices of the Researching Incivility in Everyday Life (RIEL) Project this article builds upon the ‘everyday incivilities’ approach pioneered bySmith, Phillips and King (2010)to examine moral dimensions of everyday encounters between strangers. Preliminary analysis of the RIEL data indicates that ritual dimensions of interaction between strangers in public space provide interactants withmoral affordances, that is, opportunities to align themselves with an idealized moral order through projective moral action.