some observations about social perception and behaviors in public places

This post is taken from notes I jotted down on my computer on March 18th while waiting to board a flight back home to San Diego. I spent a lot of time second semester thinking about how an individual's perception of the world is completely dependent upon their own experience, something that we talked extensively during the "Diversity" section of the MetaOlin independent study I was a part of. "Stepping into someone else's shoes" is often very difficult because many times links between and understanding of other people is built from shared experience. If there are very little commonalities between individuals or groups of people, understanding can be very difficult.

In any case, while sitting at my gate, waiting for my flight to begin boarding, I stopped doing whatever it was that I was doing to observe everyone around me. It struck me how there aren't many places where every walk of life collides. Many groups of people are hardly ever seen at an airport, because they have no reason to be there. Parks, schools, malls, and other public places are frequented often by a specific class/type of person. The less fortunate don't often stroll around inside a Nordstrom, for example, or even a mall with a Nordstrom in it, because there is no reason for them to. Well, an airport may not necessarily be the best place to "see all walks of life," but it was still interesting to stop and think about my surroundings.

To my left was a mother with her three children and their grandmother. Two of the children were little girls about the ages of 9 and 12. The other child was still an infant, and was being carried by the mother to keep it from falling asleep before boarding the plane. The two girls were on their cell phones/ipods non-stop. They complained once to their mother about how the other was not letting her charge her cell phone long enough, and when they weren't on their phones or occupied by their phones they were asking their mother if they could buy something to drink from Starbucks. Finally the grandmother gave in and said she'd go to Starbucks. Well, as much as the girls wanted to go, one was talking on the phone, which was apparently more important than getting Starbucks. As a result, the girl then lowered the phone to give her grandmother specific instructions about what she wanted before resuming her vivid phone conversation. While this is just a short anecdote, by the end of my 30-40 minutes or so of observation I laughed to myself, thinking that if I tried I probably couldn't spoil these children more than they already were.

Another clump of people was a bit further away from me--a bunch of 15 year old guys all wearing different sporting equipment. They all dressed, acted and talked alike so much that it was easy to tell even from their normal clothing that they were all a part of some baseball team coming home from a tournament. Most sported backwards baseball caps, gum, hoodies, baggy jeans, maybe even a chain or two. I laughed to myself, thinking that I was looking at the quintessential target audience for most hip hop music. (Something like 80% of rap music is bought by young male caucasians.) Stereotypical, maybe, but after watching them for a while it was amazing how they operated as a unit with one or two prime/leading individuals. Everyone sort of fed off of a handful of the people in that group, and it was scary how much their behavior resembled that of a living organism...weird...(30 min segment--NPR: A Look at Hip-Hop, 'Beyond Beats and Rhymes')

There are other examples, but those two are the ones I remember the most about. In any case, I'd also noticed after a while how little interaction there was between different types of people. There was the little boy who ran around until he saw another little boy, whose parents then started talking to the first boy's parents. There was the elderly couple who had a short exchange with a young couple who seemed a bit confused about where they were. All in all, most people kept to themselves, despite any connections/commonalities they might have shared. So while there are some examples of people reaching out and talking to other people, for the most part college students didn't randomly start talking to other college students, or anything like that. What was interesting was the way that most interactions started, regardless of whether or not people were similar in age, ethnicity, or gender.

At one point the intercom made an announcement telling passengers that they're flight would be delayed another hour or so. All of a sudden different people who all were on that flight started talking to each other! First one person would ask someone else if they could repeat what the intercom had said, just to make sure they'd heard correctly, and then they'd talk for a minute or two. From then onwards they were a lot more likely to say random, spontaneous things to those individuals. For example, at one point after the announcement the mother with the three children told the elderly couple sitting to her right: "Well, I was going to try and keep (the baby) him awake, but now that we have 2 hours..." Then the elderly man chimed in with something about their own children and how putting taking them on airplanes was always difficult or something...

Now, you may think I'm being silly by saying this, because of course people with shared experiences/something to talk about are more likely to talk! But what is interesting to me is that this tendency is completely a cultural phenomenon. Having lived in Mexico for most of my life, I can attest to the fact that interaction for the sake of interaction is much more common in Mexico for cultural reasons. What is it about the United States (and other places, presumably) that makes us want to isolate ourselves into little groups while in public places or even in our neighborhoods?

One final note worth mentioning is something I realized as I stopped writing my notes, closed my laptop, and pulled out my headphones and book. Where did I fit into the social fabric? Here I was, a college student with more electronic equipment on me than is probably necessary, sitting around typing notes in my computer after checking my email, calendar tasks, and blog feeds only to stop doing those things and re-immerse myself into another solitary activity: reading. Well, there's not necessarily* much you can do about who you are and where you fit in within any given group of people, but an awareness of how you relate to your surroundings is valuable.

*I say necessarily because many times an awareness of say, the fact that you're being a prick or something should be rectified. What I mean about not being able to change who you are within a group is that you can't change the fact that you are a college student, with tons of electronic equipment, waiting to either fly home for spring break or to school from home after spring break. What you can change is how you let these facts affect your behavior and interaction with other people...

That's all for now folks.