In American life most of the work of affirming or denying recognition is done with the eyes, where noticing another is the initial act. 

Every specialized profession passes on habits to its practitioners that tend to become second nature. A geologist may see a rock type before she notices the entire hillside. A doctor might notice a person’s affect immediately, before fully hearing a patient’s complaint. As a communication specialist I can’t help but notch up an early impression of someone by whether I was somehow acknowledged, even as a stranger.  My own gauge says it won’t and perhaps should not happen on the sidewalk of a busy city, but it should happen in the setting of my neighborhood. To be sure, it has become a professional obsession that is a little beyond reason. But it falls within an honorable tradition building on ideas about of our common humanity as described by Robert Putnam or Irving Goffman.  Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a wonderful and classic study of everyday interaction patterns.

Think of the sticky social dynamics upon first boarding an elevator. A question that comes to mind is whether other persons will acknowledge their fellow vertical travelers with at least a slight nod. My experience is that most simply look at their phones, careful not to make eye-contact.

For good or ill it has become a default cue about the other person’s social acuity. People at a reception desk for a public establishment are supposed to be approachable and offer a greeting. But even reception areas are slowly yielding to sign-in kiosks.  In health care the real action these days is at computer and nursing stations rather than at the bedside.

In one of the first pieces offered on this site in 2014 I offered a simulation of an internal dialogue someone might have if they have taken a route that will bring next to their boss:

The Important Person has just turned the corner at the far end of the hall. She’s with an associate, walking in my direction. In another few seconds we will pass each other in the middle of a long narrow hall. Will the Important Person notice me? Will her glances to her associate give way to a glance in my direction? Will there be a simple exchange, or just a simple nod of the head? In the Important Person’s world do I even register as someone worth knowing?

Even as we are now deeply into digital means to communicate at a distance, we still have to sort out the meanings of cues that now come through our devices.

Why hasn’t she replied to my text? Why was I not on the list of recipients for the group e-mail? Why has this particular member of this online meeting turned their video off?

In this world, popular usage has settled on the idea of “ghosting” as the ultimate name for non-acknowledgement. More commonly, almost any stroll down a sidewalk will confirm that more fellow pedestrians are not prepared or interested in a simple ritual of acknowledgement. A person on their phone is there but not there: somehow in a liminal place that preferences the approximation of another person over their actual presence. Using a phrase that is now common, we are “alone together,” often linked not through place, but through a frail digital nexus. Older “digital immigrants” like myself find this odd and a little sad, clinging to the idea that humans should spend as much time in the unmediated social world that our brains were adapted to accommodate. In the grand scheme of things, communication at a distance is still a relatively “new” phenomenon.

With digital media it is much trickier to weave gestures of acknowledgment in a conversation. We more often use our turn to talk to bring the subject back to ourselves. And therein lies the sabotage of what should be a natural human response. Again, the smartphone, which is constantly represented as the height of human connection, is actually a tool of isolation, taking a person out of the environment and placing them in a middle region that offers no real sense of place.

In American life most of the work of affirming or denying recognition is done with the eyes, where looking in the direction of another is a signature act. The establishment of this horizonal plane of mutual eye contact is essential. In the flesh, saying something to another simply doesn’t work very well if we can’t catch that person’s gaze. Obviously, this is not always possible. Indeed, busy cities are the perfect cover for not engaging. But reduce the traffic to the simple case of one passing another and it is or should be harder to withhold all cues of recognition. But it happens, and frequently the instrument of evasion against recognition is a phone, which can provide a reason for not even using the eyes to signal acknowledgement.

If you are in an environment that might be broadly considered a community, for example, an office, a college campus, a faith community, a school, the averted gaze in another’s presence can be off-putting. Among those we know we expect an offer of acknowledgement through eye contact. But, again, communities must now also contend with competition for attention from many sources, one of which is what I call “screen thrall:” the increasingly ubiquitous habit of members looking away from approaching others in favor of a low-quality fragment of a digitized other person. It’s endemic in most settings, even when individuals are known to each other. My impression is that, for some people, the preference for a mediated connection has turned into an automatic response: we will look at a camera lens more easily than another person. It’s another case where we sometimes seem to prefer an electronic facsimile over the one in front of us, with a result that can be its own small wound of rejection.