Post-napping Thoughts on "Familiar Strangers"
OK, I took a nap, and it has all become clear to me now. In my previous post I talked about how the Jabberwocky project is flawed because I didn’t see the real user need. Somehow during my really, really long nap, a few thoughts untangled themselves. I began to be convinced that there may actually be a problem in the urban lifestyle that can be aided by mobile technologies.
These thoughts turned into an abstract of proposed research for my RSMG1 report [pdf].
Eric Paulos is a researcher at the Intel Research Laboratory, Berkeley.
The basic idea on Paulos’ research is to study the possibility of applying the “familiar stranger” concept, which was first coined by Stanley Milgram in his 1972 essay on the subject. His theory was that people in public places they visit everyday build up some kind of relationship with the strangers around them. These “familiar strangers” are categorised between complete strangers – people who you have absolutely no connection to, and people you know. His experiment involved taking photographs of a crowd of people at a railway station and showing it to people congregating around the same place a week later, at the same time of day. He found that 89% recognised at least one person from the photographs, with an average recognition rate of 4.0 people.
Paulos repeated the same study to see how the familiar stranger idea applied to the modern world, rampant with mobile devices. He found a similar area to the light railway station of the original experiment – Constitution Plaza in Berkeley, California. The recognition rate was still high (77.8% with an average of 3.1 people recognised), but not as high as in Milgram’s results.
What I find interesting about this familiar stranger concept is that there are yet to be any technological aid in helping us get to know them better. Yes, there are systems which help give “ice-breakers” to people sharing similar interests to promote spontaneous interaction in social settings (Nokia Sensor springs to mind). Yes, there are online social networks that link friends together. But when we walk around our familiar city, isn’t it a shame that we cannot, out of curiosity, get a feeling of what the people are like without much added effort?
Blogs are an interesting development, and makes it easy for people to express themselves. It’s obvious that personal blogs contain a lot of information about our personality; something that was difficult to get hold of in the past. Even the Pentagon’s NSA have put money into researching how to mine the massive amounts of data people post about themselves online.
The one interesting question that comes from this: what kind of impact would it make if we had the ability to get to know the personality of our familiar strangers? We can only imagine the potential social practises that could arise.
Let’s wait until the next nap…
Reference: Paulos, E. The familiar stranger: anxiety, comfort, and play in public places
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