Week 3 Tute: Civil inattention

Week 3, Goffman's civil inattention, and what a phone screen does to it

8 March 2027

Civil inattention is Goffman’s name for the thing strangers do constantly and never talk about: a glance that registers another person exists, immediately followed by looking away, granting them the right to pass unbothered. It’s the baseline courtesy of shared public space, so automatic that you only notice it by its absence. Walk any footpath and watch two strangers approaching head-on: half a second of eye contact, a barely-perceptible shift in shoulder or stride, and both pass without either one having to stop or apologise. Neither person decided anything out loud. A phone screen doesn’t just distract you from that exchange; it changes who’s expected to do the noticing, because the person looking down has opted out of the half-second glance and left everyone else to read and route around them instead.

Before the session#

Pick a busy corridor, footpath or station concourse and watch it for at least 20 minutes. Log every clear instance of civil inattention you can identify, and anything that breaks it (staring, blocking, forcing someone else to step around you without adjusting course yourself).

In the session#

We build a shared list of “yielding” behaviours and test a specific claim: that someone looking at their phone while walking effectively stops signalling, and shifts the entire cost of collision-avoidance onto everyone around them: the classic version being someone drifting straight down the centre of a footpath, phone up, while two other people split around them without ever getting so much as a glance in return. Bring your log to argue for or against it, and bring at least one case where the phone wasn’t the cause; sometimes the breach is just someone staring, or planting themselves in a doorway.

Afterwards#

The next field task builds directly on this one: instead of just noting that people kept their distance, you’ll measure how much.