Now Juliet Finnis, a second year undergraduate, will share
with us some of her insightful observations on cultural
behaviour at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, which she did
as part of her work in one of her semester one modules.
For one of my modules I chose to study Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, London.
For those of you who haven't been to Speakers' Corner -
it's a really good experience and I really recommend going.
It's a lot of fun.
What Speakers' Corner is - is every Sunday morning you get
speakers getting up on their soapbox or their stepladder,
and talking about the topic they really care about.
And then you get listeners coming and listening
or talking back, and the debate is going.
It's a really fun experience as you can go round and
you can listen to all the different speakers - and they'll
be talking about anything they feel like;
they'll be talking about bus fares, taxis, Gordon Brown,
Jesus, anything that they feel strongly about.
It's a really interesting experience.
But what I went there to do is to document
how speakers were moving in the space.
So how they were orientating their bodies in the space,
and how they were interacting non-verbally as well.
That's what I went there to find out.
I initially stood in the freezing cold, literally for hours,
just sort of watching to see what was going on,
to observe how people were behaving and what they were doing.
It initially seemed like quite a chaotic place
where people where shouting at each other,
they were pointing at each other,
they were debating, and people were
coming and going a lot, like to and from different speakers.
So it was quite a chaotic thing.
But then, after being there for a while and making notes for a while,
I realised that there were actually subtle patterns as to
how people were using the space and moving in the space.
This is what I found -
this is a birds-eye view diagram that I've constructed from observation.
The big coloured-in blob is the speaker,
and then the rest of the blobs are the listeners
that orientate themselves round the speaker.
I've divided it into three different spheres.
In sphere one, the listeners are standing very closely to each other
and really close to the speaker. In this sphere
the listeners are using a lot of eye contact,
and pointing and talking with the speaker.
In sphere two, the listeners are a bit more distanced from
the speaker and a bit more distanced from each other.
They're just people sort of standing there
with their arms crossed like this or arms in their pockets,
just listening but not actually debating with the speaker.
The listeners in sphere three are people that
kind of just come and go.
So they'll be people that will be jogging along,
and then they'll stop and stretch their hamstrings,
and pop their heads over and just see what's going on.
Then they might carry on.
Or they'll be listeners who are just kind of walking their dog,
and they'll stop for a minute, and they'll look over
and listen for a bit and then carry on on their trip -
on their walking trip.
In the next photograph,
this shows you a bit more clearly what's going on.
So you've got the guy in the white t-shirt who is
in sphere three; he's walking along, and he might just stop
to pop his head over and then carry on.
The guy with the bicycle is also in sphere three.
Conclusively from this I found that listeners in all three spheres
experienced space differently,
depending on their level of involvement with the activity.
And that's it.
Thank you very, very much Juliet.