Week4) Review about my Interaction Assignment

 The place I have been observed is a café. The café involves a few tables and chairs. It is well designed for the outsiders to get interested.

 When I was there, two kinds of people were in this place. They were the clerk and the customers. 

 

The clerk welcomed the visitors politely and made some beverage and dessert. She was in smile for all the time facing the customers and mostly dressed in tidy clothes. After she got the orders, she stayed in the kitchen, which is staff only, taking a rest and looking at the CCTV occasionally.

A few hours later, the other clerk got into the kitchen for the rotation.

 

 Besides, in the main room of the café, the customers sit around the tables. Some of them drank coffee and tea talking about their boring life. Some worked with their stuff very silently. And others played the board games making loud noise. In specific, there were two people sitting in front of me. They were a teacher and a student. The student bought a cup of coffee for the teacher, and the teacher instructed the student a better way to get a great grade.  The customers were mostly in different shapes and ages. They talked about different topics of their life.

 

In this case, the behavior of the clerk making dessert and beverage and the behavior of customers enjoying the goods by the clerk should be the performance.

 

For the region, the front stage is the main room of the café. The back stage is the kitchen for staff only. And the off-stage is outside of the café blocking with the glass window.

The front stage is well designed and clean. The things there are in good look. However, the back stage is just a normal kitchen without any decoration.

 

The team should be the clerks. They rotate for each other in time and share information about the work.

So in this place, the clerks are the performers. They know most of the information in the café.

The customers are the audiences. They just enjoy this region. They don’t have to know anything about the kitchen.

And the people hanging outside the café is the outsiders. They can just see the small part of the café.

There are no discrepant roles such as informer, shill and spotter.

Normally I observed a lot of people, but observing people according to Goffman's theory was all the more interesting. It was also a fun time to feel myself acting differently depending on the place.