REU group, 14 July, 2004

These notes are meant to sensitize fieldworkers as they observe and write up their notes. But they are not intended to discipline the observing eye in any very direct way. They indicate what we will try to draw out of the notes when we analyze them. Usually, the fieldworker will just go along on an outing without worrying about seeing "important" things. Even when writing up fieldnotes, your focus will be on chronological description. But, over time, a sensitivity to these themes should improve the quality of the fieldnotes that result.

In particular... if there is one emphasis you should stress above all others...it would be especially helpful if students would write notes with a sense of the structure of the social process in mind. I.e., they should follow the chronology of movement into different strips of behavior, or different kinds of doings, and the segueing from one strip to the next, in a continuous narrative. That requires taking the perspective of one "ego" and following it over time, versus depicting snapshots by shifting the researcher eye to one person or set of people to another.

This will never be easy. There will always be compromises to the researcher's ability continuously to sustain a focus on one person or set of people over time. Even if one writes notes on one's own outings.

The problems in sustaining continuous focus may make up much of the practical problems we have to work on with the researchers.

We have, at present, three kinds of phenomena we emphasize in data collection. Then, at present, we have four lines of analysis we build up with our data. And then there is a special "cartooning" operation that we want to try out, on at least two themes.

1. Conflict and Avoidance

In some forms this is easy to see: dog owners complaining about aggressive dogs and their owners; women at a dance club expressing disdain for some males there; mothers in parks mediating conflicts among children; fights in pickup basketball games; employees at a donut shop managing disturbing behavior by someone 'on meds'; turning a blind eye to people who solicit you.

In some forms, conflict and avoidance is more subtle. These include patterns of separation among groups at the beach; blacks leaving a park or park section when Mexicans arrive, and vice versa; choices of time and place shaped to avoid undesirable contacts.

One common theme in public places is the question, "Do I fit in here? Am I out of place? Am I like these other people? Should I stay or leave or go to a certain area of this place to feel comfortable?" Indirectly, these experiences relate to themes of conflict and avoidance. On the beach, are you comfortable with your body appearance? In a dance club, who are you comfortable with, who not? On Rodeo Drive, in a fancy store in a shopping mall, in an expensive restaurant, do you fit in easily or are you concerned that you'll stick out because of your manners, lack of money, ethnic appearance?

As an observer, you often can't be sure that the behavior you're seeing is concerned with conflict or avoidance. Not to worry: describe what you can see and hear; if you develop a sense over time for the ways that conflict and avoidance are subtly part of people's behavior, your notes will be increasingly useful on that score.

"Going out" and family relations: when can adolescent 'go out' on own?; what if a mate "goes out" to a movie, dance club, without the other? Lori Cronyn, Latina school students with two sets of clothes.

Public space as theater has many overlapping dimensions.

Spectacle, what's observable to all present: These include features of a scene that draw common attentions (Venice Beach, e.g., is full of them), that form audiences of strangers united in their common regard, and that are available as objects of attention to anyone present (the homeless, the ocean, a performance in the shell at the Hollywood bowl).

Public space as spectacle may be indicated by something as obvious as people taking photographs, street people who call for attention, or a performance that occurs on a formal or informal stage.

Public spaces are indirectly treated as spectacles in many ways. There are signs of various sorts that are put in place to draw attention, although the people there may or may not attend to them. In general, people do not guide their attentions in a constantly changing, 360 degree survey of their surrounds. They train their regard on some areas, things and people much more than on others. Those non-random patterns are the lived reality of public sites as spectacles.

Audience formation: Sometimes, that an audience is formed is what's notable, like when a crowd gathers to watch a mime on the street. In some places, it's obvious that an audience is there, like at a sports event, because that is a constant; but the nature of that audience as a group changes from moment to moment. At contemporary baseball games, for example, visual and audio systems are used to organize the audience into an expressive populist mass, screaming in unison, expressing aggressive concerns, all led by a hidden, unitary leader of the cries.... Not unlike a Nazi rally. That it's all "in fun" is, of course, important. But the potential political meaning of professional sports, in forming an expressive populist community that transcends usual dividing lines in society (income, race, gender, geography of residence), is important to explore. So, fieldnotes that would describe changes in the way the audience becomes a group, acting in unison in ways that all there can witness, is important to note.

Appearance work, preparing self for display: what people do distinctively to shape how they will appear in a public place. Going 'out' often means being seen by what one regards as a special set of others, who will regard you in special ways. For example, for some people, going to Rodeo Drive occasions special appearance preparation, and being on Rodeo Drive elicits a sense of vulnerability with regard to one's class, ethnicity and social status.

It usually takes interviews to get the data that show these concerns with how one will be and is seen. Public sites can be grouped and differentiated by the distinctive kind of appearance preparation work done before entering them. One indicator of the sacredness of a place is the kind and amount of preparation done to enter it. For some people, at some times in their lives, going to school or work can be more sacred than going to church.

On site, one can see how the site brings out versions of one's identity for others to see. At some sites, what is on display is one's athletic ability, "lifestyle," family relations, body shape, wealth or social class. For example, movie theaters have tickets all at the same price; but dramatic theaters and concerts have seats that differentiate people by wealth, at least by what they pay for the ticket.

Switching from Audience to Stage: From one moment to the next, a person can be in the audience or on stage. The processes in which these shifts occur can be described.

At some points, a person may switch from being a passerby to being an intruder.

At some moments, people may realize they are attracting unexpected attentions, being tracked, objects of undesired gazes and approaches.

Some settings encourage people to be on stage, others discourage that. The Dorothy Chandler symphony/opera hall has a grand central staircase that puts theater goers on display, as in great palaces and European opera houses. The Frank Gehry Disney building minimizes that, creating multiple, more private experiences of the building.

Reveries: public places different in the kinds of day dreams, fantasies, private images they encourage. On queue to check out at the supermarket, there are magazines at hand that stimulate fantasies about stars, politicians, lifestyles. On the beach and in dance clubs, other fantasies are stimulated.

Experience in public places is not just a collection of snapshots but is always part of an ongoing movie. In the life of each person, being in a store in a shopping mall, watching a movie, jogging on a mountain path, riding a wave in the surf... are moments in a strip of life that has a series of scenes before and after these moments. These strips are narratively bounded. They are not just continuous in an undifferentiated flow from death to birth. Each moment that a person is in a public place, he or she knows that moment and site as one stage in a trajectory, a series of stages with a beginning and an ending. Part of what one is doing at every moment in public is orienting to the overarching narrative trajectory of the "outing."

People usually orient to the transcending trajectory of the outing in subtle ways that are not easy for researchers to see. Sometimes a cell phone conversation will reveal that when a person expects to leave a site and how they are understanding the 'outing' they are on: "I'll just pick up some groceries for dinner and come home." Sometimes actions are silently done to shape a later part of the narrative: I'll park here near the entrance of the lot, even though it means I have a long walk across the lot to the entrance of the concert hall, in order that I can get out quickly when the show ends.

But it will often only be after we inspect fieldnotes that we become aware of the subtle ways that people shape their conduct with an understanding that they are in an 'outing' that unites several stages in time and places they will be in.

Behavior oriented to being here and there, and to now and then: cell phone use; anticipatory work like packing up and making up; working out beginnings of the next thing while still doing a current thing, like shopping for items in a recipe that one will cook when back home.

Errors and mild troubles are often signs of the outing or trajectory meaning of given moments in public places: like realizing you haven't prepared properly (grocery list; wrong clothes); rushing to get somewhere; conflicts of "when will we get there" and maneuvers to extricate oneself and leave.

Errands, tangential forays: Doing Y on the way to doing X, or stepping out temporarily to do Y while doing X... these strips of behavior that are recognized as "exceptions" from doing a longer strip of behavior are ways that people orient to the ongoing trajectory, or over-time narrative meaning of their conduct.

Segments: As an extended strip of narratively coherent behavior, an outing has many segments. For example, when you go to a restaurant to eat, there is the segment of getting people together to leave at the same time, the segment of getting there, the segment of parking, and the many segments of the meal. You should use these segments to organize your fieldnotes... to remember what happened and to describe what happened in order.

Narrative primacy: what's a tangent, what's the main narrative? How is that established? In whose mind does the narrative exist? "Going to the beach" might take 4 hours, and involve 20 minutes of actually being on the beach. All the other segments have meaning, narrative sense, but they are somehow subordinated to "the beach" as the narrative that holds all the segments together. You don't actually have to spend much time on the beach to go "to the beach," but you need to be "going to the beach" to make it sensible to pack a bathing suit and towel, maybe to get together with a friend that day, to drive from home to the ocean, etc.

See notes below on The Structure of Social Process.

Related to the "theater" concept above, what makes a place "public" is not legal or economic ownership status but whether it is regarded as a place where strangers freely enter, and where one will be among strangers who are strangers to one another.

Going to a public place brings out things in oneself that more private environments may not bring out. The sacredness of a place is revealed by feelings elicited in anticipation of going there and while there: trepidation, dread, care in preparation for entry.

In many ways, public spaces often represent being in a community. This seems to be why 'going out' is used to forge more private relationships: especially in mating and family bonding, "going out" is a means of making private relations more intimate. The public sphere, which represents being in the community in a sense, serves as kind of sacred liminal space for passing from less to more intimate relations.

Many of the things people do when "going out" they also do at home: eating, watching movies.... What is the specific attraction of doing these things "out"? There is more than one answer: convenience, variety, etc. But there are sociologically more interesting answers: to avoid the relations at home that would be entailed if you did these things at home; consecrating a relationship in a kind of rite of passage by putting relations to the test in ways that reveal commonalities and distinguish the set from others. In one sense, people often seem to go out and pay for something in order to say they don't like it. I.e., they find how they are integrated, sharing the same tastes, by going out to set themselves apart from what they find. This social psychological process, or the needs fulfilled by going out, is the basis of huge contemporary institutions.

2. Access and Demographics at the Site

The population at the site is negotiated in complex ways.

How the site is set up creates implied or expected population, for example play structures imply that children will come.

Whether places are functionally public or private, private in the sense of used by a population that excludes others, is not determined by legal or economic control. Some public parks are private; some private malls are public. Here we look for what the signals are, and how people read them, that lead to the actual population at a site.

In this section we can put fieldnotes and interview materials that show concerns about, "do I fit in?" Prices are high on Rodeo Drive, but you don't have to buy much to be there. But maybe you sense you don't "fit in," unless you are there in the guise of a tourist. Some parts of a beach get known as for certain kinds of people; others avoid them.

At many sites, there are "regulars" or insiders and outsiders who, even if they are there, feel they don't belong as much as do others. What is the process of becoming an insider?

What is done on site to encourage and discourage different populations? Pushing away the homeless; player-maintained rules for getting into pick up basketball; procedures for reserving courts to play tennis may require proof of a connection to the area, like residency or employment.

On site, integration, on one dimension, is often accomplished through interaction that segregates people on other dimensions: in parks, sections for children, that literally prohibit older people, are used by diverse families, putting kids into contact who otherwise are separated; and in parks, sections for elderly do the same. Public bathrooms do this, at the extreme: sex segregated, integrated in all other respects.

Characterizing integration/segregation on site is a tricky matter. Not just because we are wary of imputing ethnicity, age, etc. It's often a subtle matter for the people there as they sense who they are "with" and not "with." On a bus, for example, simple comments, courtesies, can forge a sense of relationship, a being "with" someone. For me, putting my bike on the bus often leads to relations on the bus with people of other races, ages, sex and social class, a sense of being "with" people I might never encounter elsewhere. This theme gets us close to the study of "othering" and, conversely, identifying someone there as "like" me

The range of demographic categories, or 'types of people' there, is not necessarily what official demographic data would consider. There are many 'types' that may have only local meaning.

A great objective, one that we surely cannot accomplish in a systematic way but that is worth the effort, nevertheless, is to grasp the segregating/integrating meaning of a place for people as they sense the difference between the populations they interact with there and the populations they interact with in other settings in their lives. Driving is an important "field" in which people interact with diverse others, probably a more diverse set of others than most encounter elsewhere in their lives. The qualities of interactions when driving thus have an importance to people as, in effect, a way they get a 'sampling' of their society, a view of who the various other people are out there, and what kind of people they are.

That's another way to put the segregation/integration theme: public places offer the possibility of "sampling" to people: at a public site, you get a view of a set of people you may not encounter elsewhere, giving you an empirical base for generalizing about some sector of your society. A more 'integrated' place is like a randomly sampled population, in a qualitative, if not quantitative sense: people take it as a basis for extrapolating.

There's also the issue of whether the little society that forms in a public site reproduces or varies from the structure of society in general. E.g., for Proust, promenading at Deauville or on a boulevard in Paris was a way of seeing society recompose itself. Elite people dress that way; working class people dress, walk, and stay in other places; the beggars, prostitutes, street musicians distinguish themselves as an underclass or an out-caste.... For us, now, some public places, maybe Venice Beach, produce population demographics that are in some sense "radical" critiques, indicating that people can get together across lines that usually separate them. So there's a subtle political tone to such places.

Here are a couple of propositions to guide data gathering. They are not offered as established truths; we have little reason at this point to be confident in them. But they indicate how our research can be relevant to political/policy themes.

Proposition 1: Integration over sensitive lines, like race and ethnicity, is made possible (though not inevitable) by firm segregation on uncontroversial lines.

For example, playgrounds limited to children get ethnically different families to mix. Basketball courts, where sex and skill limits are informally but effectively present, facilitate integration by age (people from a larger age range play than in school teams). Park activities for the elderly mix people from different races. Bathrooms, which follow strict sex segregation, mix people on all other criteria.

Conversely, space with no segregating dimensions, like parks and beaches, encourage people to use segregating principles to associate.

Proposition 2: Privately owned public spaces integrate people by ethnicity more effectively than do publicly owned public spaces. Why? Because, on the one hand, exclusion costs private owners lost profits, while the process of obtaining governmental commitments to create and manage public spaces depends on ethnic-based political support.

To make this proposition testable, it is necessary to limit the range of application to comparable sites. It makes little sense to compare the population at a high end restaurant with the population at Yosemite Park.

For example, there is more age, sex and ethnic mixing in fast food restaurants, donut shops, and convenience stores in low income, minority neighborhoods, than in public parks in those neighborhoods. Or, there is a more integrated interaction at the food concessions at parks and beaches than there is in the free use of park and beach land. Or, at Griffith Park, there is more integrated interaction in the use of the golf course and the horse rides, which you must pay to do, than in the picnic areas or hiking trails, which are free.

My guess is that, as a global comparison, a contrast of private/publicly owned space as more and less integrating is wrong. But starting with this as a falsifiable proposition, we get to see the issues we need to define to make it researchable, we can be led to the conditions that make for integrating interaction, and we can focus on the ways that people maintain segregation in their interaction even when they are in close proximity.

Think of "going out" as an extended course of time and behavior within a day's experience. Within this course, there are many strips of behavior; the "going out" is a series of linked strips.

Are there constant or at least common identities to these strips? Anticipatory preparation; getting there; entry to site once there; a special narrative strip of behavior once on site; exit maneuvers; the travel segment of going on to the next site or going home.

Outings differ in the structure of these extended social processes. How many units or strips? Of what kinds? How many "travel segments," e.g.? We can imagine labeling segments by type, like "travel segment" would be type T; entries, type E; special narratives on site (ordering and eating and paying for food; watching a movie; settling into and then 'doing' a site at the beach) as N. And we can compare outings by, e.g., how many Ts, how many Es, how many Ns?

As with all sociology, there is payoff here if we find non random patterns. That seems a good bet.

It would be very helpful if students could write notes with a sense of the structure of the social process in mind.

Cartooning I. The Structure of the Social Process of Goings Out

Transportation metaphors are useful for describing differences in how the social processes of "going out" in public are structured. Types of outings can be characterized pragmatically, by the structure of their sequential actions, and independent of their cultural names and their popularly recognized similarities and differences.

By cartooning these, we will be led to new provocations for data collection and for analysis.

1. Trains: after arriving at the public site, people in effect get a round trip ticket and take a seat on a train, moving from one stop to another until they end at the beginning. You get on a track or path, you move and then stop, move and then stop, on and on in a multi-stop sequence, until you're back at the starting place.

--amusement park rides literally put people on trains, bringing them to one surprise encounter after another (encounters with horrors, falls, sped up segments).

--museums, of art, sex, Ripley's (Un)Believe Its, Jurassic Technology: you move from exhibit to exhibit.

--funny mirrors

--guided tours, on buses or pedestrian, with live guides, book/audio guides, or guide posts/signs fixed in the city, to follow (Aix en Provence, Cezanne walk, with bronze footsteps set in the pavement: you stop and look at things he painted)

--window shopping

2. Helicopter Trips: the getting there and the return home are on the order of commuting; they are specifically "transportation" time, sometimes to be hurried through, borne, endured, sometimes used as a basis for temporary amusement, side-tasks, fore-play... but the main purpose of the trip is a single landing spot, in which a substantively distinctive activity is engaged for a while; then the trip home. (structure of sexual interaction processes? A kind of public outing structured isomorphically with the most private interaction?)

Alone or with others on the commute, meet known others and strangers on site, return alone or with others:

--commuting to work

--going to a seminar class in school

--to surf; pickup basketball; chess at donut shop.

Traveling with others you know on the commute, you relate to them on the way, then sustain that unit while among strangers on site:

--to restaurant (notable that going out for entertainment often is structured like daily work and college seminar class life, but on a different scale)

--to movies

--taking pet to dog park or on mountain hike

--to a site for exercise

These kinds of outings may be compared by the process that structures the pacing and that throws the participant into an object-like, "being done by" stance, in which the participant is responding to provocations as if they are independent of his/her will, versus a"doing," subjectively sensed, choice making posture. Like the difference between stretches of keeping up with the treadmill and moments of resetting its speed.

The essence of most games (volleyball, basketball, chess) is to play with this alternation; the other's actions structure your need to respond decisively, so you try to get control of the other's actions to get control of your own.

3. Racetrack: doing a round trip for the sake of doing the round trip

--walking dog in a loop around home

--jogging/biking from home and return

--treadmill-like exercising: you get into the routine and its logic takes you; you can adjust pace, but mostly the experience is of a structure provided to you by the activity you're into.

Often a racetrack will be the destination for a helicopter trip: you drive to Venice Beach, unload your bike or put on your roller skates, and then do the round trip back to the parking spot/landing pad.

4. Donkey Rides: meandering movements that are balky, not disciplined sequences. The moving, determining force is not so much the things out there that you look at or hear, but what they provoke in you. The provocations are not as uniform, formally objectified by others who set the scene, as they are in a museum, a shopping arcade or mall, or an amusement park.

--parts of Venice Beach boardwalk have impromptu, but often predictable, informally arranged "shows" or people on display. Some you get drawn into, or someone in your set does, like a mime. Or someone wants to stop to buy an ice cream.

--Walter Benjamin's city tourist

--string of errands in small town or familiar environment, where may stop and chat

--tourists in cities, not following a tour

--Proust promenading at Deauville; walking through a garden

--lovers, virtually anywhere

--the hidden stream of reveries that accompanies all outings in public.

5. Exploratory voyage: packing up, preparing, taking trip to arrive at a site with prospect of developing an unexpected post-site segment of life

--dance, night clubs, bars, Starbucks hanging out... to get picked up, to hook up... (NB: in these, stimulants ingested)

This picks up the segregation/integration theme. The premise is that there are a limited number of types of outings with regard to the changing integration/segregation as social relations develop over the phases of a given outing. If we label social identities as X and Y, overlooking the substance of the identity and focusing on whether Xs are with only Xs or also with Ys, or with Ys and Zs, or maybe with Ys and ys, etc., these can be easily cartooned.

We have at present four basic types of cartoon frameworks.

1. Solo expeditions: Going out on one= s own to jog, read in a park, eat a meal in a restaurant or take a drink in a café, walk a dog, shop for groceries, run an errand to the dry-cleaners... Interaction with others only briefly occasions pauses or detours from a pre-envisioned course of sequential conduct in a single life= s biography.

Cartoon story board: A single X, moving among various other combinations of people.

2. Informally Pre-tied outings: Going out to a pre-visioned public site in a previously related set or social unit, for a family picnic, on a date, with friends. The set may assemble completely before arriving at the target site or coalesce in part or whole only at the destination itself. Once assembled, the members of the set encounter others primarily in the status of landscape features which, in unpredictable fashion, will sporadically occasion commentary or reflections within the pre-tied group.

Cartoon story board:

A picnic at the beach: trip starts at family home, X1, x1, Y1, y1 get organized, get to beach, traveling alongside diverse others on the road. At the beach they set up a segregated picnic spot, and then x1 interacts with x2 (kid from another family), while X1 and Y1 stay segregated from X2 and Y2, with rare exceptional adult-adult contact across families.

3. Hooking up: Going out, alone or in a pre-set social unit, to explore the prospect of meeting someone new with whom one might have a continued relationship. Issues of loyalty to the pre-set unit and the ethics of realigning with newly met others may perk up at any time.

Cartoon story board: X1 and X2 move to dance club from left as Y2 and Y1 move from right; X1 interacts with multiple Ys, returning to 'base' with X2, then goes off with Y1....

4. Site-bounded sets: Going out to interact with people not previously met, with no expectation of sustaining a continuing relationship after leaving the site: pick up basketball in a public park, chess games at the beach or in donut shops, games struck up in pool rooms. Las Vegas is a city dedicated to the creation of this form of public life, which also characterizes anonymous sex in public bathrooms. Over a series of such outings, some of the others on site may become pre-known and expectations of regular encounters may be engendered, altering the outing so that, at least in part, it takes on shades of a pre-tied outing.

Cartoon story board, of pick up basketball: X, Y, Z, A, B move toward common destination from origins that are segregated (X with Xs, A with As); interact in integrated manner, rapidly, creating mini-segregations as teams formed and some win, some lose; then leave, returning to segregated environments.

5. Organizationally pre-set outings: These are formally pre-tied groups, in which many or all of the members may have little prior shared history. Unlike the outings of informally pre-tied groups, here someone will explicitly label and define the expected experience, if only in a general way, and specify rules and roles for participation. The individual's experience takes shape in response to these expectations and rules.

Examples: school trips, LA People Connection, YMCA and religious group camps, a guided tour...