I have powers of invisibility

And other random sociological observations

I was reading

Jeannine Ouellette

’s post this morning about the importance of paying attention as a writer. Sometimes it’s hard for me to distinguish between the paying attention I do as a writer and the paying attention I do as a sociologist. It’s not a distinction that matters that much. Sometimes I keep my sociological observations to myself because they sound, well, strange. I mean, a true sociologist questions EVERYTHING and this can get exhausting. Just ask my husband.

Nonetheless, here are a couple of things I’ve noticed lately that lean in a sociological direction. Yes, they are also strange.

Every woman in Classic Hall washes her hands the exact same way

Obviously, hand-washing is something we all started paying more attention to during and after the pandemic. Before the pandemic, hand-washing in the bathrooms on campus was variable. Some students did not wash their hands at all. They were in a hurry to get to class or whatever. There are lots of things I judge, but the lack of hand-washing wasn’t one of them.

Photo by Curology on Unsplash

For students who did wash their hands, the methodology was all over the place. A quick, perfunctory pass under the water. A more thorough soaping up and rubbing their hands together, usually with both hands held flat, the kind of rubbing you might do to keep your hands warm. The duration of the washing varied, too. There was the performative wash that lasted less than five seconds. Then the more elaborate hand-washers who topped ten seconds.

Then the pandemic came and now, every single women in Classic Hall, where I teach most of the time, washes her hands the Exact. Same. Way.¹ Turn on the water. Squirt out some soap. Lather up. Rub the soap all over their hands, making sure not to neglect getting the soap between their fingers. Every wash is at least twenty seconds in duration, with the last ten seconds or so rubbing their hands together under the still-running water.

I swear to you I could film this process and it would be identical every single time. Somewhere, there’s a video that outlined how to wash your hands and all of my female students saw it and four years after the pandemic, every single one of them is still washing their hands this same way.

Probably this seems like no big deal to you, but let me convince you that it is sort of amazing. There is almost zero total uniformity in the world of human behavior. People drive differently and walk differently and write differently and cut up their food differently. Yes, there are general trends, but complete uniformity? No. Total uniformity is really hard to accomplish. It’s what basic training in the military is all about. Weeks and weeks spent trying to get soldiers to march together. To tie their shoes all the same way.

The women in the bathroom at Classic Hall have not been through boot camp. They did go through a terrifying, traumatizing global pandemic. Some expert told them how exactly how to wash their hands and that is how they do it and maybe how they’ll go on doing it for the rest of their lives.

I’m not saying there isn’t wisdom in washing your hands in the way experts have told you to. What I’m interested in is the ubiquity of the process. It takes A LOT to make people between the ages of 18 and 22 act exactly alike and yet, here they are. I’m interested in the small ways our lives and worlds have changed since the pandemic. A whole generation who will never think of hand-washing the same way again.

I have powers of invisibility

In a presentation last week, a student reminded me of Erving Goffman’s great concept of civil inattention. This is the way in which we respect the boundaries—physical and psychological—of other people when we’re in public spaces. We pretend not to be aware of other people even though we have to be aware of them. If we weren’t aware of other people, we’d bump into them or stumble over them or sit on top of them.

Civil inattention is how we create an illusion of privacy even when we are surrounded by people. When you’re sitting next to someone in a coffee shop—even if it’s at the same table—you pretend not to be aware of them. You pretend you can’t hear their conversation if they’re on the phone. You pretend you can’t read what they’re typing on their computer. You give them their space and they do the same for you.

It takes a lot for us to break civil inattention, especially in big cities. When someone’s doing something weird in public—talking to themselves, stripping down naked—we’ll still mostly ignore it.

Civil inattention is one of those great concepts that explains something we take for granted—how to function in public spaces—but that’s really important when you start to think about it. Children usually haven’t grasped the rules of civil inattention yet. They’re not very good at pretending all the very interesting people around them aren’t there. They walk up to strangers. They ask invasive questions when you’re just trying to drink your latter. If the rest of us didn’t develop some civil inattention, we’d all be like five-year-olds in the coffee shop. Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing, but it would definitely make it hard to get any grading done.

After the students’ presentation, I started thinking about the way civil inattention works in the classroom and especially in the liminal time before class starts. There is this phenomenon where it becomes clear that students believe I cannot hear or see them in that liminal space, even though I’m sitting at the front of the classroom. I become invisible to them or they believe they’re invisible to me? It’s unclear.

I know this is the case because students say things that they probably would rather I not hear during that time. They’ll talk about their social activities in sometimes explicit detail. Or they’ll complain about another professor. Maybe in those instances, they just don’t care if I know how drunk they were last night or how much they despise my colleague.

But I know they really don’t think I can hear them because they also do things like saying to their classmate, “I didn’t do the reading. What was it about?” That would be mildly annoying and maybe a little amusing, except students in my classes have to write online journal responses to the readings that are due before class, so it’s clear that they are soliciting information about the readings in order to turn these journals in before class starts even though they have not done the reading. They are, you know, cheating, while I’m sitting right there in front of them. They are cheating and making zero attempt to hide it. This is less amusing.

In fact, it’s a little rage making. As Goffman would predict, I experience this as disrespectful. What the hell, I think to myself. Can they not see me sitting here? Do they think I’m stupid? When people violate the rules of the interaction order, of which civil inattention is one, it pisses us off.

I don’t know exactly what’s going on with students in these interactions. Do they think my hearing is so bad that I can’t hear them? Let me clarify that they’re not whispering these things. They’re saying them at normal volume. Do they believe that the time before class starts is a public space and so I should be showing them civil inattention? But even civil inattention breaks down if someone is talking about someone. If someone next to me at the coffee shop was talking about how annoying I am, I would probably at least shoot them a nasty look. The expectation of civil inattention would no longer apply.

Maybe they believe the classroom in that situation is a private space, even though they’re surrounded by other people? Maybe they got used to the world of Zoom interaction and they believe that their microphone is turned off. The meeting hasn’t started yet, so I can’t hear them, right? Maybe, like the five-year-olds in the coffee shop, they’re just not fully socialized?

I have no idea what the answer is, but it’s an example of how even the very frustrating parts of life can be fascinating if you get sociological about it.

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1. I don’t know what’s happening in the men’s restroom, but would be interested in all reports…on hand washing.