Comments on: I’m Sooooo Q

By: Lauren

Lauren — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:18:13 +0000

I’ve found that the subway is a great place to send students to do field work and observe non-verbal communication. When I teach Intro to Sociology, one of my students’ favorite assignments (or so they tell me) is to ride the subway with all of their senses open. That means no iPods, no New York Posts, no fiddling with their cell phones. The goal is to be a discreet observer of human interaction: what are the myriad ways that people on the subway communicate with each other? Rather than eavesdrop on conversations, what I ask my students to observe is how people communicate without words. They write up lovely field notes about how people’s posture, gestures, tones of voice, fidgeting, eye contact and so on communicate romance, disgust, boredom, and anxiety to the other passengers on the train. Clearly the oblivious passengers in Tom’s story above would have failed this assignment. Also, please note that the author cited in the brandification article is a graduate of CUNY!

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By: Hillary

Hillary — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:19:47 +0000

Thanks for the comments, Tom! And great point, Suzanne, about the very thing that makes our subway so unique. It’s so true– and anyone who’s been stranded after-hours in a city where the trains halt at 9:30 can attest to just how easy it is to forget about how well a subway runs when it stops running!

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By: Suzanne

Suzanne — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:57:43 +0000

One thing the New York City MTA does not communicate very well is what makes the Subway so fundamentally New York and that is that it is the only 24 hour public transportation system in the world. Yes, it is loud, dirty, broken, but it never stops, and as the history of this city goes so goes it’s subway. How’s that for branding.

And if I remember my childhood legends there is an old and very big wine cellar that is connected to the tunnel of the “old’ Q line. Tom any information on that…?

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By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:30:19 +0000

Thanks, Hillary, for opening up a new field of communication analysis: public transportation! My favorite NYC subway story occured a few months ago. I was sitting in the second-to-last car of the N train. While glancing up from my reading, my eye caught the sight of a group of people in the last car pressed against the window of the door between cars clearly signaling that they were stuck in that car. The rest of my car (with every seat filled, but not enough people to block sight of the last car) were not responding. At least half of them in my judgment were pretending to be so engulfed in their iPods or Sudoku puzzles that they couldn’t have a clue that a car-full of people were furiously waving for their attention. In order to communicate this problem to the subway operator, I had to go back to the locked door between cars, do some crude on-the-fly sign language with trapped group to learn that their intercom was out and the doors not opening. They pulled the emergency stop cable in the next station, and I jogged up to the middle of the train to tell the crew person. He then came back to open the doors and unleash a car full of angry New Yorkers who had overshot their stop by as much as 4 stops, because apparently they had been waving for 3 stops before I got on). In this age of fiber optics, this story demonstrates some slow communication indeed.

On a more academic note, I particularly enjoyed the article on brand-ification, and Hillary’s reading of it with respect to NYC history. I look forward to sharing the article and commentary with students in my urban history course at Baruch.

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