ABSTRACT
According to Erving Goffman (1963, 22), “co-presence renders persons uniquely accessible, available, and subject to one another. Public order, in its face-to-face aspects, has to do with the normative regulation of this accessibility.” In Goffman’s public places-antedating the spread of digital technologies-people constantly monitored other people in their surroundings in both explicit and ambient modes of encounter. In these settings, the more public the place, the more it was filled with strangers. Goffman’s metropolis-and more generally Western cities in the twentieth century-are places “for strangers” (Lofland 1998), whereby strangers pass one another in a civilly inattentive way.
