Anne Galloway pointed me to the Berkeley Intel Research Lab's
Familiar Stranger Project. The concept of the familiar stranger is described on the project site:
The Familiar Stranger is a social phenomenon first addressed by the psychologist Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject. Familiar Strangers are individuals that we regularly observe but do not interact with. By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction. The claim is that the relationship we have with these Familiar Strangers is indeed a real relationship in which both parties agree to mutually ignore each other, without any implications of hostility. A good example is a person that one sees on the subway every morning. If that person fails to appear, we notice.
Familiar Strangers form a border zone between people we know and the completely unknown strangers we encounter once and never see again. While we are bound to the people we know by a circle of social reciprocity, no such bond exists between us and complete strangers. Familiar Strangers buffer the middle ground between these two relationships. Because we encounter them regularly in familiar settings, they establish our connection to individual places.
In presentations at conferences (and to students) lately, I've been talking about the importance of technologies like zero-conf networking, particularly as evidenced in OS X Rendezvous-enabled tools like iChat, iTunes, and SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra). Until I looked at the Berkeley project site, however, I hadn't really put those tools together with the "familiar stranger" concept.
The connection seems obvious when you look at these tools. When I open iTunes these days, I often see shared music libraries from people I don't know--mostly students, some colleagues from other departments. The same people often show up in my Rendezvous iChat window. I don't know them, I don't interact with them, but I see them regularly, recognize their virtual presence.
danah boyd has also discussed the familiar stranger concept in the context of YASNS like LinkedIN:
The power of the familiar stranger is ringing loudly in my head right now because i continue to talk with folks about LinkedIn. I fear that too many of the social software folks don't realize why context is essential for giving folks a reason to interact, to connect, to bridge one's social network. People are not simply motivated by what they need or could give, but by what fundamental reasons they have to connect... Introduction rituals are essential for connections and to properly do so, one needs more contextual information than a limited version of one's resume. Social negotiation, even in the professional realm, is not limited to strictly business... it is inherently social.
While danah worries that her concerns will be dismissed by "real researchers" in the field of social networking, the Berkeley project seems to strongly support her ideas.
To that end it is necessary to declare that we are not interested in designing a friend finder, matchmaking device, or system that explicitly attempts to convert our strangers into our friends. Strangers are strangers exactly because they are not our friends, and any such system should respect that boundary. Having strangers on our urban landscape is not a negative thing. On the contrary, the very essence of individual and community health of urban spaces intrinsically depends on the existence of strangers. Their complete removal would almost certainly be detrimental.
I'm fascinated by that statement, actually, because it so succinctly sums up what troubles me about many of the social networking systems out there--that they explicitly attempt to convert our strangers into our friends, and that their developers seem resolute in their unwillingness to acknowledge the problems inherent in that approach.
1. Dave Bayless on November 17, 2003 10:05 AM writes...
Yours is an important point. In this world, work requires boundaries. Relationships that convey social capital are a function of context. But, our social lives are n-dimensional, which strongly suggests the usefulness of fuzzy boundaries. Those who purport to offer smart social software risk outsmarting themselves. (At least, I've managed that trick on more than one occasion.)
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