Civil Inattention Research Articles

Surechigai sociality: location-aware technology on the Yamanote line

Every day on Tokyo's Yamanote line, over a million people come face to face. For some, this can be a source of anxiety and discomfort, because they are expected to obey the social etiquette of maintaining one's distance from strangers, despite the train cars being filled beyond capacity. To make the train ride bearable, passengers have adopted a wide range of practices aimed at creating and maintaining personal space, and these practices increasingly involve the use of technology. This article focuses on surechigai tsūshin, a location-aware technology installed in Nintendo's portable gaming devices, which allows users to engage in quasi-anonymous encounters with digital strangers while ‘passing by’ on the street or on the train. Such technologies and encounters show how train cars serve as spaces where estrangement is negotiated and mediated in Japan today. Surechigai tsūshin offers a means to control how one comes to know others, acting as a digitized form of civil inattention. The sociality of surechigai is maintained as smooth ‘passing by’ among strangers who are virtually and actually co-present, familiar and distant faces on the train. The volume of human traffic on the Yamanote line compounds the social effects of surechigai tsūshin, showing how a variety of technologies articulate with one another to create distinct forms of sociality. In this sense, the significance of the Yamanote line rests not only in its characteristic ‘intimate alienation’ (Fujii 1999), but also in the sociocultural negotiation of technologies that mediate experience on the urban railway.

Digital absolution

Based on online observation of communication in a web-based weight loss forum, this article identifies the relevance of confession and absolution as characteristics of online interactions. Our close study of forum messages, arranged as web diaries open to comments from participants, shows that self-blaming posts elicited absolutional replies. With a primary interest in those personal posts which had a confessional character, we identified three aspects of absolution in replies: collective, prospective and supportive. Of special sociological interest is how online interaction in the forum challenges the concept of ‘civil inattention’ (Goffman, 1971) as a basic social norm for interaction in public spaces. Rather, absolutional attention defines the interactional order within the forum, in which diary authors receive feedback on their accounts of challenges, problems and failures. Studying online communication in detail may contribute to an important theoretical refinement of interactionist sociology, which currently strongly rests on studies from pre-Internet times.

“Oh, My God, I Hate You:” The Felt Experience of Being Othered for Being Thin

It is universally held among researchers and social critics that a thin ideal dominates current cultural conceptions of what is attractive, especially for women. Using interviews with eighteen women and men, this paper investigates an apparent paradox: how thin people negotiate a landscape where the attention they receive because of their thinness distresses them. Results indicate that thin people are often the target of unwanted comments about their size, comments produce an unpleasant state of self‐consciousness, and the expectation of unwanted social interaction will motivate thin individuals to avoid certain social situations. Results are interpreted in terms of thinness being a hypervisible condition that produces a breakdown of norms regarding civil inattention toward thinness and produces the experience of being othered by social perceivers.

Rice, T. Hearing and the Hospital: Sound, Listening, Knowledge and Experience. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing. 2013. 204 pp. £55.00 (hbk) ISBN 978‐1‐907774‐24‐9

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the development of various versions of sensory ethnography. This trend in part reflects the opportunities afforded by recording technologies, so that non-specialists can readily collect photos and videos, or sound recordings. In turn, there is considerable methodological interest in multimodality. That is, the systematic analysis of the multiple modes of social activity (spoken, gestural, semiotic). Authors have therefore addressed the multiple ways in which social action and cultural categories are ordered. In addition to language and embodiment, there has been sustained attention to smell, touch and sound. Sound, of course, has featured prominently in various genres, including the development of sonic sociology that has its origins in the sociology of music. Ethnographies of social settings have incorporated soundscapes – the sonic equivalent of landscapes – that capture the totality of sounds in any given social world. Tom Rice's monograph on sound in hospitals is a major contribution to this genre. Indeed, despite the topicality and popularity of sensory ethnography, sustained studies of this sort are relatively rare (as opposed to small-scale, one-off observations and programmatic statements). It is, therefore to be welcomed for that reason if for no other. In fact, a general account of soundscapes occupies only a fraction of the monograph. Two chapters are devoted to the generality of sounds in the hospital. Hospitals and their multiple settings are noisy places, and sound reflects many of the everyday features of hospital life and work. Sound flows and intrudes. One cannot do the equivalent of ‘not looking’ as a means of civil inattention, so that the moral contamination of the total institution is compounded by its soundscapes. Privacy and tact are invaded by unwanted and uninvited sound (from which the headphones provide one escape route). Equally, sound can be monitored, and hence it becomes an aspect of the surveillance exercised by nursing staff. The panopticon is defined by its encompassing vision. That scopic control here is mirrored by a sonic counterpart: the panacousticon? The bulk of the monograph, however, takes a rather different direction. Rice devotes considerable attention to diagnostic listening. He focuses on the stethoscope, as symbol and as practical device, used in the enactment of the medical habitus. In a discussion of auscultation and the transmission of auditory knowledge, Rice explores how medical students are taught to listen and to hear. He then goes on to examine how the demonstration of phenomena such as ‘classic’ heart sounds are used to inculcate the distinctive modes of perception and inference that characterise clinical medicine as a body of knowledge and practice. Here I think we see the strengths and some weaknesses in Rice's overall approach. The close scrutiny of auscultation allows him to develop a fine-grained ethnography of instruction and perception. On the other hand, this is a single modality. His approach to sensory ethnography does not lead him towards a genuinely multimodal analysis. Consequently he pays insufficient attention to the work of others who have examined the relationships between instructional talk and visual culture (such as Saunders on the CT suite) and is prevented from developing his argument into a more thoroughgoing examination of the modes of clinical knowledge. This is, however, an original and welcome book. The publishers are also to be commended for their commitment to the publication of monographs.

Mobility and sociality in proximity-sensitive digital urban ecologies: ‘Timid encounters’ and ‘seam-sensitive walks’

This paper is a case study of the use of a proximity-sensitive game played on mobile gaming terminals, in Japan and in France, Dragon Quest 9, and of distinctive forms of mobility and urban encounters which emerge around it. We show how players, when assembled together, walk the ‘connected walk,’ that is they adopt a particular gait, slower than the usual walking pace, with repeated pauses which appears as a tentative and exploratory kind of mobility oriented towards the random occurrence of proximity-based screen-mediated events, and therefore both adjusted to and constitutive of the proximity-sensitive hybrid ecology as a serendipitous place, to be experienced as such. With respect to urban encounters, we have identified a characteristic tension, relevant to locative media in general, in which concerns with potential identification and recognition ‘in the game’ contrasts with the interaction order of urban traffic encounters, characterized by ‘civil inattention.’ This gives rise to the phenomenon of ‘timid encounters,’ in which players strive to experience game encounters with other players a few meters away, while trying to elude visual or verbal recognition.

Twitter: a content analysis of personal information

Social media provide many opportunities to connect people, but the kinds of personally identifiable information that people share through social media is understudied. This paper presents findings from a content analysis in which we coded the amount and kinds of personally identifiable information of public Twitter messages. Overwhelmingly, public Twitter messages do not include identifiable information such as phone numbers, email, and home addresses. Using Goffman's [(1963). Behaviors in public places: Notes on the social organization of gatherings. New York, NY: Free Press] concepts of public order and civil inattention, we also coded for whether people articulate the kinds of information that are communicated with others in public space, including locational, temporal, and activity-related information. Our findings suggest that people do share similar kinds of personal information on Twitter that they do in others kinds of physical public spaces, suggesting that people may also be mapping old practices for public social interaction onto networked publics.

Merging mobile communication studies and urban research: Mobile locative media, “onscreen encounters” and the reshaping of the interaction order in public places

This communication discusses how the use of locative media in urban public settings allows users to recognize one another’s proximity on screen. Such “on screen encounters” make simultaneously relevant the categories of passer-by and mobile user, thus creating a tension between an orientation towards civil inattention or engaging in focused, face-to-face interactions. Such a tension is characteristic of the interaction order of urban settings experienced as location- or proximity-aware “hybrid ecologies”.

Race and Interactions on Public Transportation: Social Cohesion and the Production of Common Norms and a Collective Black Identity

In this article, I examine interactions on public transportation in order to assess social cohesion among members of the same race. Contrary to the prevailing view of social cohesion in urban places, I find that individuals in poor, black areas demonstrate more social cohesion than individuals in more affluent, white areas. This cohesion is meaningful as it plays a role in the production of common notions of a particular black reality and collective black identity, and that it serves a normative function in defining appropriate behaviors. I use Goffman's idea of civil inattention as a heuristic for studying social cohesion.

The threat of dis-identification for HR practices: An ethnographic study of a merger

Summary Research shows that HR practices play a crucial role in postmerger integration by facilitating employees’ identification with the new company. However, the effects of identity and identification dynamics upon these practices have yet to be examined. We draw on an ethnographic study of a merger among four different banks to outline the challenges that identification processes among employees create for these HR practices. Specifically we underscore the possibility of dis-identification among employees from different premerger organizations and explore the obstacles it rises to HR practices which seek to foster postmerger identification. Our findings show that HR practices can, unexpectedly, result in initial dis-identification and disrupt integration in multiple ways. We integrate our findings into a model, which maps the mutually constituted processes of identification and dis-identification. Employees of the pre-merger companies experience human resource practices by framing and enacting them to create differences with the others, and by elaborating postmerger encounters enabled by HR practices into occasion for dis-identification and civil inattention.

Nonsocial Transient Behavior: Social Disengagement on the Greyhound Bus

Based on two years of observations and engaging in informal conversations with passengers on Greyhound Line buses, this article describes the long‐distance bus journey and the ways in which people actively disengage from others over the course of the ride. Using the Greyhound buses and stations as a microcosm of other such public spaces, I examine its unspoken rules and behavior. I paint a picture of the buses and stations, the patrons, the employees, and the transactions that take place between them. Using ideas from Goffman's civil inattention theory, Lofland's thoughts on strangers, and symbolic interactionism, I explain what I call “nonsocial transient behavior” and “nonsocial transient space.” The reasons nonsocial transient behavior emerges and thus encourages disengagement are identified as follows: uncertainty about strangers, lack of privacy or absence of a personal space, and exhaustion.

Spaces of Male Fear: The Sexual Politics of Being Watched

This article makes a contribution to the sparse literature on the ethnography of fear. Using observation and focus groups, we compare men and women’s perceptions of danger in relation to a specific civic space—public toilets. Here, it is men, rather than women, who express a marked concern about the threat of physical assault. We attempt to understand the nature and social origin of this fear, and its relationship to the arrangement of space. In so doing, we help sketch out what Tuan (1979) called ‘landscapes of fear’. Places that take us outside of, or lie at the margins of, regular social space can be particularly fear-inducing. Civil inattention is a core means of dealing with this problem and we analyse its functions in allaying fear. We also suggest that spaces in which private behaviour can be surreptitiously surveyed or where there is an indeterminate relationship between private and public space can prompt a pernicious sense of worry. Indeed, being watched and being mistakenly perceived to be watching emerge from our data as really important correlates of fear of violence. We employ Sartre, Berger and Mulveys’s ideas about the gaze to analyse the psychosocial effects of this. Finally, we stress the importance of seeing the experience of fear—including its relationship to spatial arrangement—as socially contingent. The discussion section of this paper suggests that we understand men’s fear of violence in public toilets as a reaction to what Turner calls an ‘inter-structural’ social situation, namely the temporary suspension of the usual gender hierarchy.

The eyes have it

Our eyes may or may not be ‘the windows to the soul’, but they are certainly the semiotics of our intentions. The work of Simmel and Goffman puts the eyes at the center of everyday interaction, affording civil inattention or its opposite, uncivil attention. As one foundation of everyday social order, sometimes accompanied by gestures and sighs, the eyes function as a first stage of social control – a protective layering against verbal and physical escalations. Video cameras and other technologies have enhanced the presence of the eyes in social control – the Foucauldian gaze – but our own eyes are still at the center of social control in everyday life.

Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media (review)

Reviewed by: Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media Jon Agar (bio) Mobile Communications: An Introduction to New Media. By Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon. Oxford: Berg, 2009. Pp. iii+190. $29.95. There are now as many cell phones as there are people on the planet. In two decades the device has gone from a luxury, single-purpose technology to an essential multipurpose object engrained in everyday routines of life and work. When examined closely, moreover, the patterns of use of cell phones are found to vary considerably according to place and culture. Answering a mobile on the Metro Manila, for example, is perfectly acceptable practice, yet would be considered rude in Tokyo. The ubiquity of the mobile phone, along with this pattern of diverse use, makes it an ideal subject for introducing students to themes and arguments in the history and sociology of technology. Since the 1990s, a burgeoning community of scholars, including sociologists, geographers, and historians, has tracked this phenomenon. The result is a large secondary literature of high-quality studies, much of which is too detailed or difficult for students. Nicola Green and Leslie Haddon, two UK-based sociologists, have written in Mobile Communications a short, clear primer that is ideal for guiding beginners through ways of analyzing the cell phone. Each chapter is introduced and its contents summarized again at the end. Boxes describe case studies and pose reflective questions, ready-made for seminar discussions. The assumed knowledge is basic, yet the themes and topics are sophisticated and engaging. While the book holds to no single sociological framework, several major approaches—social construction of technology, actor-network theory, domestication accounts, and the newer work on cultures of mobilities—are outlined. These are referred to later, as topics such as the relationships among technological systems, privacy, the changing experience of time, and the support of strong and weak social ties are surveyed. Other, more specialized approaches are dipped into where useful. For example, Erving Goffman is used in a neat discussion of “civil inattention,” in the authors’ analysis of the proper public behavior issue. The sociology is complemented by a short synthetic history of the mobile phone. Students will [End Page 664] benefit from this combination of sociological inquiry and historical context. The overall aim is to make this familiar object strange again (p. 145). The authors draw attention to broad generalities about the effects of the cell phone, balancing these with a picture of local diversity. For example, like other information technologies, cell phones can strengthen existing social networks but do not (or at least very rarely) instigate entirely new sets of social relations. At a European level, this has led to the mobile phone being promoted as a symbol and tool of social integration. A quick summary of Daniel Miller’s anthropological studies of the Jamaican practice of “link up” (p. 95) provides a balancing exemplar of novel use to this general theme of continuity and extension. While Mobile Communications is avowedly a student textbook, relying extensively on previously published work (not least work by the two authors), there are some novelties. I found the chapter on the camera phone, for example, with comparisons offered between Finnish, Italian, British, and Korean practices, particularly thought-provoking. There are good, direct quotations from users that illustrate the “mundane creativity” involved in exploring a new technical feature: the British woman who discovered that she could check makeup by photographing her face, or the exasperated Korean discussing the social pressure to “decorate” online photographs on the popular Cyworld site. The authors also note where they have found gaps in the literature. They bemoan, for example, the fact that early consumption went largely unstudied by contemporary scholars (p. 31), and later, in the camera phone chapter, they remind us again that the process of first learning how a technology might be used is often missed and is always interesting. Jon Agar Dr. Jon Agar is senior lecturer in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London. Copyright © 2011 The Society for the History of Technology

Bengali‐Speaking Families in Singapore: Home, Nation and the World

AbstractThis paper examines the notions of “home,”“nation” and “the world” among the Bengali‐speaking families in Singapore. The forces of globalization have played a significant role in making the Bengali‐speaking families transnational, first by uprooting them from Bengal, a territory now shared between Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, and then re‐linking them to a complex web of relationships redefining the contours of community. The Bengali‐speaking families in Singapore belong to two distinct “communities”: Bengalis from West Bengal, India who are predominantly Hindus, and Bengalis from Bangladesh who are predominantly Muslims. They formed two different “communities” not simply on the basis of differences in religion but also in terms of social networks and ties. Common language, similar food habits and love for certain cultural practices like cricket and adda, are not enough to bring them into the fold of a common Bengali community. The division in the Bengali‐speaking community is influenced not so much by religion but nationalism. Nationalism, however imagined, continues to play a powerful role in the globalized world, especially among transnational communities. Yet, the two “communities,” one from Bangladesh and the other from West Bengal, are not antagonistic to one another by any means; their relationship is an ambivalent one based on a tacit principle of “civil inattention.” The situation changed in the 1990s when Bengali was introduced as a second language in Singapore, and a Bengali language school was set up thereafter. The two communities were drawn into a common physical space and a new set of social ties and networks began to emerge, opening and redrawing the boundaries of community. The paper demonstrates how nations separate a people who share a common notion of home, as well as how cosmopolitan world‐views redraw the contours of community.

Nonverbal Behavior in a Global Context: A Time for Dialogue

Reports across diverse disciplines attest to the dramatic changes that are taking place in the connectedness of different cultures around the globe. Indeed, Arnett (2002) notes that globalization is one of the most widely used terms to describe the current state of the world. Like professionals and scholars in other disciplines, nonverbal researchers cannot avoid asking questions about human behavior within a global context. The history of nonverbal theory and research has been infused to a greater extent than most other areas of psychological inquiry with questions about cross-cultural similarities and differences in behavior (DePaulo & Friedman, 1998; Knapp & Hall, 2006). However, these questions have often been in the service of debating universal versus cultural origins of particular nonverbal phenomena such as the facial expression of emotions. Questions within a contemporary global context call attention to broader issues given that globalization entails a diversity of phenomena. The Journal of Nonverbal Behavior offers our readers an opportunity to consider some of these issues in this Special Focus on Nonverbal Behavior in a Global Context. To this end, two papers are featured. Each paper is accompanied by a Dialogue in which the lead author responds to questions posed by the editor. We hope that these Dialogues provide our readers with useful insights for raising questions about their own and other research that will move us closer to meeting the challenges of understanding nonverbal behavior in this contemporary global world. In the first paper, Patterson, Iizuka, Tubbs, Ansel, Tsutsumi, and Anson describe the results of their experimental investigation of unfocused interactions between pedestrians on streets in America and Japan. Although understanding how the process of what Goffman (1963) calls civil inattention and related nonverbal displays differ and play out in casual cross-cultural interactions is an interesting question in its own right, it is an especially important one within a global context. More specifically, in this era of globalization where

On Doing Being a Stranger: The Practical Constitution of Civil Inattention

ABSTRACT:The article takes on a less developed aspect of the sociology of the stranger: the normalized non‐relations people in urban settings establish in their effort to stay strangers for one another. How is their “civil inattention”accomplished in practice? What is the social orderliness of “asocial” relations? In order to answer these questions the article uses the elevator as a sociological research instrument allowing for a highly detailed investigation in structural problems of public encounters: bodily navigation, contact avoidance, feigned preoccupation, and the blocking of the automatism by which co‐present bodies start interactions. The setting used for the investigation also raises questions about how the artifact and the bodies present are integrated into the interaction order. The “heteromobile” of the elevator offers specific sociotechnical scripts for interaction. While the human actors work hard at doing nothing, their bodies seem to take over their agency. The specific challenge of elevator riding for the enactment of indifference is the vanishing of actors: undoing presence.

Civil Inattention Exists—in Elevators

Elevators were used as a field setting to examine the existence of civil inattention (Goffman, 1963)—the rule that in a transient encounter strangers give visual notice to each other and then withdraw attention. In Sutdy 1, confederates recorded the behavior of single riders in elevators. It was found that about half of all riders gave the confederate a brief visual notice at the beginning of the ride and then refrained from further eye contact. Of the riders, 35% added one or two glances to the initial look; perhaps these riders wanted to renew their acknowledgment of the confederates or perhaps they simply displayed more interest in their fellow passengers. In two more investigations (Study 2 and an exact replication—Study 3) confederates shared elevators with single riders and either followed or violated the rule of civil inattention. In the former they glanced at the subject and then withdrew all further attention; in the latter case they either avoided eye contact altogether or stared at the subject for the duration of the ride. It was found that behaviors consistent with the rule of civil inattention were rated more favorably than those in violation of the rule. The conditions under which civil inattention may be modified or eliminated were discussed.

The Role of Gaze in the Initiation of Conversation

The initiation of conversation presents a problem for the unacquainted. Goffman (1963) has argued that in contrast to acquaintances, unacquainted persons require a reason to converse. Thus, in order to avoid embarrassment should one per? son not want an encounter, polite unac? quainted persons should subtly determine whether the other wants a conversation before risking an attempt. One way this can be accomplished is through a violation of civil inattention. Goffman (1963) has proposed that civil inattention is the fundamental rule governing gaze among un? acquainted persons, the rule being that persons owe one another an initial giving of visual attention followed by a withdrawal of attention to indicate that the other is of no special concern. By giving visual attention in excess of a first look a person can indicate that an encounter is desired without actually speaking. The specific aim of this study is to describe the role of gaze in the initiation of conversa? tion between unacquainted students to determine whether the pattern fits Goffman's model.

Does civil inattention exist in pedestrian passing?

Does civil inattention exist in pedestrian passing?

Does civil inattention exist in pedestrian passing?

Does civil inattention exist in pedestrian passing?