The Cone of Silence

I’ve found while conducting the Smile Study that people on the subways are pretty intent on creating their own personal space (aka: their own Cone of Silence) and, once created, at staying in there.

This cone is pretty small, usually only reaching out a few inches on a crowded subway and sometimes, when body contact occurs on all sides (usually to the tune of shouts like, “Move in you bastards!” and “Make room!”) the only place left for personal space is around the region of the face.

Subway riders make the most of this by directing their stare both outward and inward. But as they say in yoga class, sometimes you have to extend out so that you can reach in. I’m not sure what it means in class but on the subway it means find something to stare at or deal with the people around you.

The top ten places that people direct their gaze while riding on the subway are (in no particular order):

1. Inside – Otherwise known as the blank stare. It’s the perfect tool to create your cone of silence. Regular subway riders have perfected the blank stare. You’re inches away from someone and you’re looking directly into their left nostril but they are looking past you, not at you. What are they looking at? What inner object attracts their unfocused stare? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. They’re in their cone and you, now that they’ve pretended you are not staring into their left nostril, can now go into your own.

2. Reading material – A book, a newspaper, a Crackberry, a magazine, or a report from work or school. Note that there’s a variation of this in which the individual will look over another’s shoulder and read their book or newspaper or magazine.

3. The wall – What’s on the wall? I don’t know. A crack in the wall? A roach running from the rats and looking for someone’s bag to enter? (Hey, I saw it once so I’m only reporting what I’ve seen) Note that the wall is usually accompanied by the blank stare.

4. Subway posters – Advertisements for beer, vodka, the zoo, dental work and lawyers, Poetry in Motion, public service announcements to mind the gap or not to stand too close to the subway as it pulls into the station, dating services, or domestic violence. When people need something to look at these advertisements are eye candy.

5. Other people – As you’ve seen from the Smile Study, this is not that common, but once in a while you can find someone looking at you from across the car. Try smiling at them, it might be me. Then I can put you into this blog.

6. The car’s electronic sign – Stating which stations are on the line, glowing in the color of the line, and telling you which stations are coming up. These are only on the new cars but they’re especially helpful when you want to tune out the conductor whose indecipherable announcement of station changes or changeover to express status has run in one ear and out the other.

7. The floor – What’s on the floor that’s interesting? I looked down there and mostly what I found were feet. Some people have a thing about feet. I’ve also seen, muddy streaks on rainy or snowy days, spit, gum, scrapes from wheeled luggage or carts, or the occasional bicycle tire, or garbage like food wrappers, soda cans or bottles.

Given these other choices, perhaps I’d stick with the feet too. At least with the feet you have no chance of making eye contact with anyone else. It’s all in the service of creating your cone.

8. Up at the ceiling – As with the floor you avoid eye contact and give others the view of your throat to look at instead of the bald spot on the top of your head. OK, that’s too much information.

9. Your hand on the pole – Either the standing poles or the cross-poles where the straphangers long ago used to dangle. Staring at the pole can be a very Zen-like experience. Fingerprints can mar the image but a nice shiny surface of steel or the green vein crawling across the back of your hand like the Great Wall of China can be a perfect vision for meditation.

It’s more dangerous than the floor or ceiling because if someone else is standing across from you then you may make eye contact. In that case most people simple raise their gaze, lower their gaze, or drop into the blank stare as mentioned in point number one.

10. Outside – What’s outside except the swirling darkness, an occasional passenger on the local train as the car races past your crawling “express”, or flashes of blinking lights. This makes me dizzy sometimes, but like a child drawn to the circular motion of a dryer at the laundromat, sometimes I can’t help myself but stare…

–Joe Lunievicz

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Its interesting to watch people and seewhat they do. People search for things to stare at and stay in their “cone” while you could be sitting right next to people with criminal records stealing your wallet.