People value their privacy, and rightly so. Your mind is your castle, and it doesn't do to have the unwashed masses digging around in your fortress trying to plant radishes. I'm no exception; if minds are private property, mine is an invisible fortress in the sky defended by the Brain Scorcher from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I'm pretty reserved, putting it mildly in the extreme.
What's interesting to me is the various steps people take to preserve that opaque shield of privacy, and how oblivious some people can be to its actual transparency.
Privacy is basically the mental equivalent of one of the earliest steps in the creation of life: having an inside and an outside. A membrane forms; inside the membrane is a cell, outside is everything else in creation. Inside your screen of privacy is you, outside is the entire world.
Take this as an example. You're in a discussion section where you know absolutely no people. The room is silent. At least half the class is pretending to check Facebook and avoiding eye contact. At this moment, everyone's shield is up to the maximum extent possible; you can still see each other, but no one is going to convince you of that. Everyone is trying their best to inhabit a tiny, diamond-hard bubble in the world, like living at the center of a pearl.
Another example. In this one, you're out with a group of good friends, after a movie or getting ice cream or whatever it is you do. At this point, every person's individual shield is rather less intense, but the group as a whole has a collective screen to the outside world. People can't just walk boldly up and be automatically included in your group. That's a grand social faux pas. In this example, you and your friends have relaxed your own personal screen on the unspoken assumption that you'll all collectively form a larger envelope around yourselves. This is sort of like the Monkey Tribe Effect, where only a certain number of people can exist within your perception at a given moment. I hope that's clear, as I struggle to explain.
The biggest problem with the group screen effect is that, simply put: well, it doesn't work. To your perception, your group has a clearly defined inside and outside, separated as a unit from the rest of the world. Within this little bubble, the things outside become generally blurred and less significant as you focus on your little slice of the world. The rest of the world, however, can see through this membrane completely unimpeded, and is very much aware of you despite your focus.
One way people often maintain this group privacy in the presence of others is by switching to a common language that "outsiders" likely would not speak and continuing their conversation, thus isolating themselves and insuring no one is "droppin' no eaves." In my physics midterm this morning, for instance, I wound up situated between two friends, who changed to a different language and continued their conversation across me. Don't get me wrong, I didn't mind in the slightest; I really enjoy learning languages, and even just listening to them is fun.
What did bother me was when the conversation pretty clearly involved me, without my ability to contribute. This was made obvious to me through subtle cues of body language, including but not limited to: pointing at me, saying something, and laughing with each other. Now that's just plain not nice, and my momma dun raised me better.
The point is this: remember, in your group settings, that others are still aware of the happenings of your group, and you're not insulated from the rest of the world. Your membrane of privacy is not as impermeable as you may think. People can hear you yelling with members of your group on the street. Even if you suddenly switch to Swahili in the middle of Canada, people are sufficiently in tune with body language and gesture-speech to detect the rough gist of what you're talking about.
TL;DR Your group is not an island; be polite.
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