For
an attempt at violating social norms, I decided to follow the lead of one of my
favorite fictional characters: L Lawliet from the anime/manga series Death Note. It took a bit of courage,
but I finally went into the middle of the Great Hall, pulled out a chair, and
mimicked L’s posture of squatting down with feet on the chair and sucking my
thumb. I proceeded to stay in this position for several minutes.
To
my extreme surprise, despite a significant number of people around me, hardly
anyone noticed. Three people who did notice simply gave me some very quick
raised eyebrows and then continued on with their business. One kid right next
to me didn’t pay attention at all; it’s like I was invisible to him. Finally,
two other guys explained to me, after I gave up and told them what my goal was,
that they didn’t pay attention because they assumed I was doing some sort of
pledge for a fraternity.
I
suppose there are a variety of reasons why so few people noticed me acting
strange. Perhaps, like the two guys I spoke with, they all thought I was doing
a frat pledge. Maybe people are so busy and isolated today that nobody notices
anything unusual that’s not right in front of them or in their current
business. In any case, acting like an anti-conformist did not bring me the
reaction I expected.
Here
is a great cartoon about anti-conformity:
It is very interesting that your action went fairly unnoticed. However, sometimes I feel that people do notice things but just seem like they aren't paying attention/noticing. This is similar to the line test we talked about in class where if most people say one of the longer lines is the shortest, then you are more likely to as well. Perhaps because it seemed like most other people weren't considering your action strange/different, they shouldn't consider it strange/different as well. I think that if you had some friends purposefully crowd around you, perhaps more people would have "noticed"/ demonstrated their "notice."
ReplyDeleteHAHAHA THIS IS JUST FUNNIEST THING GO DEATH NOTE WISH I HAD THOUGHT OF THIS! next time take pictures!
ReplyDeletehaha, that's a really interesting choice of social norms violation. I'm not 100% surprised that people didn't react violently or in an extremely outward manner, mainly because people under that situation, don't feel comfortable enough bringing out a topic. I feel like it pushes people even more to conform when there is the presence of someone breaking a social norm.
ReplyDeletelol I found your post interesting and fun because we usually see weird acts in the fall and spring sometimes because of pledging but I definitely take time to observe what they are doing. Maybe because your act wasn't directly effecting them, people didn't care to notice.
ReplyDelete