5/20/2011

Breaking the Folkway : 

This week when I went grocery shopping, I saw something that I thought I would never see.  At first I thought that the person was going to get in trouble.  I quickly started to imagine all the the things that could go wrong.  When I enter the grocery stored, I saw a girl wearing her rollerskates inside ALDI.  The girl wearing the rollerskates remainded me of the time that I had to break a folkway.  At first I was scared at breaking the folkway, but once I started to conduct the experiment, it was actually not so bad.  So by seeing a folk way being broken and being remainded of the one that I broke kind of convince me to break another one. 

I thought about the folkway that I was going to break thinking that it couldn't be too extreme in order to get in trouble.   In the end, I couldn't decided which folkway to break, it was between going up to a random person and telling them all about my life and going into public bathrooms and asking for paper and than starting a conversation. I though that either one of those was going to be weird and creepy.  In the ended I decided to do the paper toilet one, it seemed as if it was less nerve breaking and less creepy( since the person didn't know who I was).  I decided to try and find out the same things that I was trying to find out when I was to break a foldway for a school project.  I tried to find out what peoples reaction would be. 

When I was in the process of conducting my, I once again got nervous. For my expirement, I decided to go to four places, portillos, kohls, walmart, and best buy.  What I was going to do was try and start a conversation by asking for toilet paper.  I thought that the conversation should be the same to get better results. The conversation revolved around economics (gas prices, cost of products, etc.), the weather, and teenagers. 

A couple of people ignored me when I tried to ask  them questions while in the bathroom, others, the minority actually went a long, which I thought was  a bit weird. Their were three guys that actually told me to shut up, that it was weird to be talking in the bathroom.  Their was one guy at kohls that actually continued the conversation ( I thought that this guy was weird).  The guy kept the conversation going and actually started talking about different topics like his personal family and he was contrasting the past and the present ( I think that this person was an old man).  The guy creeped me out so much that I actually told him that I was leaving ( ackward). 

Overall, I think that the expirement went as I predicted, the majority of the people ignored me, and a very few actually started a conversation.  Now I know that talking in the bathroom can get ackward and that most people don't talk or go along when they are in such a position.