Behavior in Public Places

Author

Erving Goffman (1922–1982), Canadian-American sociologist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and later at the University of Pennsylvania, and president of the American Sociological Association. He is the foremost analyst of face-to-face interaction as an order in its own right.

Publication Details

Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press, 1963. 248 pp.

Description

Goffman's subject is the ordinary conduct of people in one another's physical presence — an area he argued sociology had neglected precisely because it seemed too obvious to study. His claim is that co-presence is governed by a dense and rigorously enforced body of rules that no one is taught explicitly and almost no one can state, and whose existence becomes visible only when they are broken.

He builds a vocabulary for it. A gathering is any set of people in one another's immediate presence. A situation is the spatial environment in which this occurs. A social occasion is the wider bounded event — a party, a meeting, a service — that provides the frame. Within gatherings, focused interaction involves shared attention and mutual engagement, while unfocused interaction is the ordinary business of managing one's conduct among strangers who are not one's business.

Key Ideas

• Civil inattention. Goffman's most durable concept, and possibly the single most useful observation in the sociology of public life. Strangers passing one another give each other just enough visual notice to acknowledge the other's presence, then withdraw attention to demonstrate that the other constitutes no threat, no target and no claim. It is a positive act, not an absence of one, and it is what makes crowded urban life bearable. Its withdrawal — staring — is aggression.
• Involvement obligations. Every situation carries a required level and direction of attention. Being visibly under-involved or over-involved is a breach; so is being involved in something not present.
• Involvement shields. Objects, postures and props used to make disengagement legitimate — the newspaper, the book, the deliberate examination of a shop window. A person alone in public without a shield is exposed in a way that a person with one is not.
• Tightness and looseness. The variable strictness with which situations enforce their standards, from a funeral to a beach.
• Situational impropriety. Conduct that violates the demands of the setting rather than of any particular person — the category that covers most of what makes a stranger's behaviour uncomfortable.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Goffman wrote about co-presence before there was anything to hold, and the mobile phone ran an uncontrolled experiment on nearly every rule he identified. The device is the perfect involvement shield — legitimating disengagement in any setting, which is why it is reached for the moment a person is alone in public. It is also a permanent source of situational impropriety, because it makes a person visibly involved in something not present, which is exactly the breach Goffman describes.

Civil inattention has fared worst. Its mechanism requires being seen to withdraw attention; a camera in every hand converts the passing glance into a potential recording, and the withdrawal can no longer be demonstrated. Reading Goffman alongside Perpetual Contact shows how much of the etiquette confusion of the last thirty years is a set of rules from 1963 failing under conditions they were not written for.

Related Reading

• Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
• Edward Hall
• Paralanguage
• Status
• Internalization of moral code
• Cell Phones and Their Technosocial Sites of Engagement