Essay about Ethnomethodology: Running and Eye Contact

Submitted By stevegiraffe
Words: 639
Pages: 3

We are a society that is constantly moving forward, so I decided to move backwards for forty-eight hours. I did this for two reasons, to gather peoples reactions and to see if it was a viable means of getting from one place to another. The best place to test this was at school where I would be walking through the halls with almost two thousand test subjects. Initially I thought that freshman and sophomores would react to my behavior more than juniors, seniors, and the faculty. I started my test on Thursday and my hypothesis was starting off true with a few freshman giving me weird looks and mumbling about why I am walking backwards. As the day went on I got more and more weird looks from everyone I passed. The hardest part about walking backwards all day was walking up and down stairs. After falling down two flights of stairs, I learned that going down I should walk on my toes and going up I should walk on my heels. Some of the best reactions I got on the first day were when I would trip over someone i didn’t see and making eye contact with anyone that was following me. Of course whenever I tripped over someone I would apologize but I wouldn’t stop walking and I would try to pass them as quick as possible so i could see their reaction. When I was walking backwards the people following me were technically in front of me, so this gave me the idea to make eye contact with everyone in front of me whenever I wasn’t looking where I was going. Whenever I would make eye contact with someone they would look back at me for a couple seconds ,then look away for a couple seconds, and then look back at me. Every single person would do this too, guys, girls, teachers, underclassmen, and upperclassmen. Later that day I went to the store with my parents and I decided it would be a perfect time to test on a wider demographic of people. While we were at Walmart I would pull the cart backwards throughout the store but I stopped after about ten minutes because no one seemed to notice and that concluded day one. On Friday, the final day, I started to get noticed by more and more people in the halls and was greeted with the familiar chorus of “why are you