The first, retrospective as well as present view

So something I’ve been thinking about a lot since the beginning of this class is an incident that happened in my presence on the train. There’s going to be a lot of stories about me on the train here because I ride it for almost an hour every day, and it is a hotbed of interesting social interaction.

So what happened was I was sitting on the train, reading my Kindle(I’ve got to write more about the Kindle and my interactions with strangers) and a very very large man sits down a couple seats away. Now the train is not very crowded at this point but there are still a fair amount of people around. The man sits down and after a moment I realize that he is crying. As per usual on the train, no one interacts with him verbally or attempts to look like they are interested at all. Not only does everyone (including myself I must admit) look uninterested but there is also a group attempt to feign ignorance. I think that this attempt to feign ignorance is our way of expressing guilt about this situation. We are compelled by our social learning to feel empathy for someone who is in pain, and to help if we can. But when you’re on public transportation a different set of rules apply to social interactions, and there are a new set of social objects that come into play.

I think that a lot of people perceive riding on the train as time that they can use to relax away from social pressures and not have to expend energy in interacting with others around them. What I see however is that riding on the train can create more stress and be more draining than standard interactions. When people get onto the train they tend to immediately assess who is in their reference group on the train and where they are located. At least they do half the time, the other half of the time people try and create their bubble of isolation and ignorance (using both as social objects for antisocial activity) by not letting their gaze wander at all; merely staring fixedly ahead, staring at spots their brain is designating as out of people’s line of sight/personal bubble, or by keeping their faces on their distraction tools (books, magazines, phones, ipods, etcetera).
The use of cell phones in public spaces I have also been finding to be very interesting social tools, and are extremely dynamic social symbols. A phone can proclaim many different things depending on social context. Someone hunched over their phone texting or playing a game projects that isolationist aura to the immediate physical world around them, even if they might be participating in ANOTHER social world that is contained in the transmissions from the phone. I’ve gotten totally off my main topic here but everything is flowing into itself so what the hell?

So within phones and within texting lies a new and sociologically undefined world, at least as far as I am aware. Texting has created a new middle ground between talking on the phone and sending an email, which further complicates the levels of social interaction we have today. A very quick gradation scale between the impersonal and personal interactions might be: Facebook/MySpace comments, FB/Myspace messages, emails, texting, instant messaging, phone calls, handwritten letters, and then face to face interaction. In this array five of seven of these social conduits did not exist when today’s adults were in their formative social stages. Its probably unique in human history that so many new modes of social interactions, complete with their own symbolism and set of social objects have been introduced within such a short time span. Not only have these new social modes been introduced within our generation but we all have had a hand in deciding how they are used and what the symbols actually mean. How often has that happened in human history?