Physical Context

This is where communication happens and often dictates complementary contexts. If you're a teacher, for example, your classroom is the physical context wherein you reach, or try to reach shared meaning. Your office, the faculty lounge, the restroom, the administrator's office are all physical contexts that dictate communicative behavior psychologically, socially and culturally.

Most of us work within physical contexts that have become too familiar. Daily exposure to our physical contexts numbs awareness, dumbs us down through familiarity. As a result we lose awareness of closest exits, lines of sight through windows and around walls and door frames, or moveable barriers that can help secure an area. Raising awareness of the physical context is simply taking note, listening for the unfamiliar voice, realizing a new obstruction or the removal of some furniture. Manipulate someone's physical context and you're apt to create a bit of an accident, simply because we're not paying attention out of familiarity.

More than brick and mortar, the physical context induces some mores as a result of the social and cultural contexts. We may behave differently in a chapel than we do at a grocery store. When the behavior loses continuity with the physical context it becomes more noticeable. When the role of a person within a physical context is incongruent, the context becomes vulnerable.

When I visited my daughter's school to meet with her counselor I found myself down a hallway going against the current of students rushing out after the final bell. I was out of context, an adult male in a middle school hallway, and I went unnoticed.