Assignment 7: Non Obvious Observation 

Not a euphemism for how to be a creeper

So when I read the assignment for this paper, my video game-addled mind thought about Assassin's Creed, how your character could sit on a bench and eavesdrop on two people in the distance to gain information.  Not the case here.  Our readings were supposed to help us to realize that there are very subtle hints about people that can actually reveal a lot about them, without them realizing it.  In the paper's we read the non-obvious cue was the word choice of people when writing and speaking.  Specifically, pronouns.  After reading these passages, i'm sure that there are other hidden cues that could be used to identify them.
I'm not actually going to write about the readings (though one was horrible and one was good), but rather how I can take this knowledge, and apply it to the ethnographies we performed in our videos.

In our "run", we went to the Dixie Chicken, which is a bar on Northgate, and played a round of 42, a game involving dominoes.  While wearing the camera on our heads, we would walk into the bar, ask the bartender for some kind of drink, and then sit down at a table of 3 volunteers outside of our group.  We would then play the game, maybe talk for a while afterwards, and that was it.  Each run probably took about 5 minutes each.

There are many obvious things we could look for, such as the person's apparent height, or their hands if they appeared in the video.  But the non obvious cues could be more telling, or at the very least, they would be more fun to use as clues.  For instance, we could look at the choice of drink that the person ordered.  There are certain social stigmas on men getting colorful, girly drinks, for example.  But people can still break such rules.
Another thing to consider is the relationships of the three volunteers that we played 42 with with each of our group members.  two of them were good friends with one of our group, the rest didn't know them at all.  The third volunteer was in a relationship with one of our group members, and the rest of the group knew this person in ranges from not at all, to pretty well.  As a result, the behavior and levels of eye contact of each volunteer around our group members might vary a lot.

Also, the bar was full of mirrors, so any one of us could have our own friggin' reflection on tape.