When we were originally assigned this topic for our blog post I had a lot of ideas about where I wanted to go. First I thought that I wanted to go to the mall and just walk around, but then I decided that there would be too much going on and I would not be able to take in enough action all at once to find the “hidden messages”. Then, I thought that I would go to the JC and observe what was going on there, but I figured that since I am there four out of seven days a week I would probably overlook a lot of what goes on there simply because I am used to it. This left me clueless as to where I wanted to go, so I decided I would figure it out later. The next day, I went to get my hair cut. I did not realize until halfway through my hair being washed that the hair salon is the perfect place for this assignment for so many reasons.
One downfall of choosing to complete my observations for this assignment in the hair salon is that it is very hard to hear conversations around you. Because of the blow dryers, the music, and the constant running of faucets it is often difficult to hear conversation. Adding to that is the fact that most of these people are rather impersonal with each other, seeing one another maybe every 4 to 6 months, making conversation pretty limited. But what was positive about this lack of conversation and inability to hear things was that I was able to pay much more attention to people’s body language. One would think that at a hair salon people would be somewhat relaxed, enjoying their time being pampered. That is surely not the case, at least not in the hair salon that I observed. It seemed that the atmosphere was so incredibly rushed, I could literally feel the tension that people were feeling just by glancing at them. It was about one o’clock on a Wednesday, so I got the feeling that lots of the people were there on their lunch break, especially the men, since their visits tend to be quicker. While I was waiting to be seen, I noticed people constantly checking their watches, tapping their feet impatiently and looking around to see if they could get attention by displaying an obvious sense of urgency. Not only did I see this occurring in the waiting area, but I saw it with people getting shampooed and cut as well. I noticed tons of people poking their hands out of their smocks to look at their watches or search through their purses through their cell phones. I even saw one man ask his hair dresser to wait a second so that he could take a call. Perhaps everyone was so urgent because this salon was located in the middle of Tyson’s Galleria, where many people from surrounding businesses tend to visit.
So, this was actually a really great environment for me to perform this in even though I could only hear the humming of a couple of sounds (blow dryers, faucets, etc.), because it allowed me to observe people in a different way. It was almost as though I could read their thoughts which, in my mind, is far more powerful than hearing any conversation.