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.

Disruptive ambient music: Mobile phone music listening as portable urbanism

“…Furniture music affords a rhythmic accompaniment to everyday chores and activities. As people interviewed acknowledged it, mobile music listening in public allows them to enjoy and focus on the music, instead of fulfilling certain social conventions or worrying about their public performance of behaving appropriately like strangers (Hirschauer, 2005) and among strangers. This is also afforded by other mobile phone activities, such as talking, messaging or playing, which provide distraction and entertainment, allowing for specific rhythms of attention and inattention to the physical space and the auditory space generated by the phone (Bassett, 2003).…”

Using Lost in Translation to Prepare Students for the Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Realities of International Business

“…Research suggests that different cultures handle small space environments, such as elevators, very differently (Hirschauer, 2005 When in unfamiliar cultural territory, we tend to hook up with people from similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Breaking out of our cultural comfort zones is always challenging (Volet & Ang, 1998).…”

Digital Photography and Picture Sharing: Redefining the Public/Private Divide

“…Technologies present and used in urban settings take and have taken part in modes of public behavior-such as how city dwellers perform civil inattention (Lasén 2006;Hirschauer 2005). This concept coined by Goffman (1963) refers to the ways in which individuals show their awareness of other people's presence, without making them the object of particular attention: a way of displaying lack of interest without disregard, a competence to refuse relations without creating nonpersons (Hirschauer 2005, p. 41).…”

“…For example, a mutual "eye catching" exchange-through which a person admits seeing another-is swiftly followed by the withdrawing of attention "so as to express that he does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design" (Goffman 1963, p. 84). This is also a practice of strangeness, a social nonrelation requiring a disciplined body: the performance of doing being a trustworthy, indifferent, and nonthreatening stranger (Hirschauer 2005).…”