Strategic busyness with props lets urban strangers justify avoiding eye contact and interaction.

Evidence

Note that this absorption with props functions to keep the eyes occupied so that one does not have to be concerned with eye contact (a type of contact which body-management users take great pains to avoid). And the busyness suggests to those about that here is a person who has many important things to do and is therefore not a person with whom one should attempt any interaction. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 889

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges to the reader’s stated purpose: this is civil inattention weaponized — the posture of absorption manufactures approachability-barriers that let the observer stay unmoored. Connects to Simmel’s blasé attitude and Cole’s unreliable observer.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘the decorum of busyness’ — how pretended absorption in props is the public-space analogue of the literary observer cultivating distraction to avoid being implicated.