2 - Healthier small groups

So the way eye contact works as a tentative conversation opener is you look at someone, and they give you a clearance sign for that conversation by meeting your eyes. The reason this works, says Goffman, is that the very fact we're using a sense, that fact can be noticed. And the way we notice that is by using those very same senses!

If two people look at each other, they can see each other and *simultaneously* see that the other person has seen them. It's really efficient.

This visibility is used in small groups. Whenever you have more than two people together, there's the chance that a pair of them might be carrying on with their own secret interaction, just between the two of them. They're being disloyal to the gathering.

This is no problem in the real world because if it gets too bad then everyone else in the group can see what's going on. That visibility moderates the behaviour and keeps everyone concentrated on the main activity.

No such luck in cyberspace. If there's a bunch of us chatting, it's usually really easy for a couple of people to start a direct connection, to start talking without anyone else noticing, even about the same subject. It doesn't feel impolite, as it would in the physical world, because nobody's going to notice, even though it still shifts their attention from the main event.

In the real world, people generally opt to stick with the group and feel uncomfortable about not doing so.

In other words, they're polite. I'm quite up for this idea of politeness. Number one, people want to be polite. Number two, people don't want to put other people in the position of having to be rude.

You can see this in software.

There's an example here in a piece of software called Montage which a research group developed to help a team of people work together even though they were in geographically distributed offices. Montage simulated popping your head into someone's office to see if they were busy, and if they're free, you can ask them a question.

The way it did this was to have a button on your computer that brought up the video from a webcam on somebody else's machine. Looking through this webcam, they called a glance. Glances were reciprocal, so if you looked into someone's office with the webcam, a video of *you* fades up on *their* computer.

It worked pretty well as it happens, but people did say they felt more obliged to let those video glances turn into encounters than if someone looked through the door.

Why? I'd say it's because there's no plausible way to pretend you didn't notice the video approach. You're working on an Excel spreadsheet when *bang* a video pops up on your screen. No way you're not going to notice that. In fact, it's so obvious that you can't not notice that, the person who's glancing in must have a really important request! So either you ignore them, and implicitly accuse them of frivolously wasting your time, or you take the message. People take the message.

So. People want to be polite, in general. In a group situation they'll moderate disloyal activity and join in with the *whole* group instead of carrying on with a side-interaction. That's why, in Glancing, you glance not at individual people but at the whole group. Because in real life, politeness would encourage you to look at the whole group. The software default is to assume you want to be polite.

This isn't true, for example, with email. It's all too easy to reply only to the sender on a cc'd email. Even if this doesn't happen to you, you're not sure whether anyone else is doing it. There's a lack of visibility.

Incidentally, I'll come back to the question of why software doesn't generally give you visibility of sense use in a bit. But for the moment I'm talking about why eye contact is good, so,