The first thing I noticed upon entering the children's section was a big buff security guard standing right in front of the entrance. I walked past him and through the aisles looking to see if I could find anything good. To my left I saw a father reading to his three daughters and as I continued to walk around I saw many different families huddled together reading to their children. The problem was that they weren't reading on a stage to a group of children, they were in a corner or away from others to not bother others. Unfortunately, I couldn't get close enough to hear anything without looking like a weird creeper and I didn't want to get in trouble with the big security guard. After about twenty minutes of making different attempts to better scope out the scene I decided I wasn't going to get anything rich enough to write about for an observation.
I remembered that there was a new Best Buy that just opened in Union Square, so I went there. After I walked around for a while I noticed individuals playing with the digital drum kits and people of all ages testing cameras, computers and tv's, but the only place I really saw two people or more was at the test video game section. I walked up and saw two teenagers probably between 12-15 playing a new version of donkey kong. After standing a couple feet away from them for five minutes I didn't hear a word out of either one of their mouths. I guess this showed a mental focus within each of them, but I wanted to hear some juicy bits of teen culture, but they wouldn't give it to me. After a couple more minutes of standing there the two teens started to notice me and began to look back at me more and more. I assumed they were wondering why I had been standing there watching them so long or was wondering if I was interested in playing. I figured I should walk away before they got annoyed of me being a pest hovering over them. Once again, just like at Barnes and Noble I left without any content worth writing about or making any type of critical analysis.
I was shocked. I thought this assignment would be easy as pie. I just would go out to public places where children gather and look and listen to their actions and write about their interactions. What I didn't realize is that when you're a part of this interaction it's no problem to gather info but when your standing ten feet away acting like you're not hearing what they're saying, it's actually pretty hard to get any juicy tidbits.
One of the better observations I have made happened by coincidence yesterday. In my neighborhood at Duane Reade pharmacy they have a movie vending machine. On the top half of the machine is a tv monitor playing clips of the movies they have to rent. For some reason the monitor mainly plays clips of children's shows, specifically Alvin and the Chipmunks. I can only assume they do this because kids gravitate towards the tv monitor and convince their parents to rent a movie from the machine.
The other day I was in the Duane Reade about to return my movie and there was a group of girls probably between 9-11 yrs. old who were browsing the movie machine. After they had realized that I wanted to use the machine and they knew they were just browsing, they moved to the side. However they didn't leave the scene. They literally just moved to the side and watched my every move. They continued to hum Alvin and the Chipmunks which was playing on the monitor above. As I was browsing the movie selections one of the girls said, "oh, The Proposal, that's a great movie even though it's so sad." I thought this was funny because The Proposal is a romantic comedy and why had these children seen that movie? I checked out my movie and as the next guy started to browse on the machine, the girls again started to give the man suggestions and tell him which movies they thought were good and bad. I don't know what these girls were doing or where their parents were. I assumed that their parents were shopping in the store and the video machine was more exciting than shopping.
In Linda Louis's Visual Development class we learned that in artistic development usually children between 8-10 years old fall under phase two or three. In these phases, children feel so strongly about their ideas that they need to share them to whomever will listen. This is because a child feels good/efficacious about something they have made and feel it is important enough to share and talk about to others. In this context these girls thought that because they had already seen the movie, their opinions were important enough to tell someone else. I'd be interested to see what the similarities are in general child development and visual artistic development. I'm curious to find out if these girls were so active in giving advice to each customer. Was it their age that made them so willing to share information or did they think movies were cool and by showing others that they were so knowledgeable about movies that were out of their typical age range made them even cooler? Or was it just that these girls were bored waiting for their parents and found it more entertaining to stand by the movie machine and share their thoughts with the other customers? I think it was a little bit of all that.
I thought it was funny that after I had gone to places with the purpose of observing kids and left without any good information, I found what I needed while out running a few errands.
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