“People have always found ways to carve out moments of privacy in public space; this is part of what makes public space tolerable for everyone. Civil attention’s twin is civil inattention, ‘whereby one treats the other as if he has been seen but is not an object of undue curiosity,’ as Goffman described. We nod at the stranger stepping into the elevator and then return to staring at the ceiling or look up briefly from reading when other commuters get on the bus.

“Civil inattention is still a kind of acknowledgment, qualitatively different from being ‘looked at as through air.’ When we focus our attention on the glowing screens of our smartphones rather than on the people around us, never granting them even brief acknowledgment, we are not practicing civil inattention but civil disengagement. This is becoming the norm in public space.”

— Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World