Familiar stranger

A familiar stranger is an individual who is recognized by another from regularly sharing a common physical space such as a street or bus stop, but with whom one does not interact. First identified by Stanley Milgram in the 1972 paper The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity, it has become an increasingly popular topic in research about social networks and technologically-mediated communication.

Milgram specified that for a person to become a familiar stranger, they must be observed repeatedly over a certain amount of time but never interact with each other. Familiar strangers are more than complete strangers but do not rise to the level of an acquaintance. But if such individuals meet in a different setting, for example a different city or off the street, they are more likely to introduce themselves than would be perfect strangers, as they have a background of shared experiences.

Early experiments on familiar strangers by Milgram involved researchers visiting train stations and university campuses to survey people about who they recognized. They found that 89.5% of people knew at least one familiar stranger. These experiments have been repeated at least once with similar results. One aspect of research on familiar strangers that hampered research was lack of available data about these relationships. With the advent of widespread social media and urban analytics, researchers have used new datasets to understand familiar strangers, including public-transportation usage and web blog networks.

German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote an article discussing the stranger in society. He states that the phenomenon of the “stranger” is the unity of liberation and the fixation of space; physical conditions are the condition and the symbol for human relationships. He wanted to talk about the stranger form the perspective of them being someone who comes today and stays tomorrow rather than a person who comes today and is gone tomorrow. In the organization of the human relations Simmel says that the unison of nearness and remoteness is an important factor. It all comes down to distance, someone who is close to you is really far way and someone who is far from you is actually close by. Simmel feels that the stranger is close to us to an extent; we share a connection with each other. Our human nature brings us together so to say, it holds similar national social and occupational features.

In 1972, Milgram and his students conducted an experiment to test how widespread the phenomena of familiar strangers was. His students took photographs of people waiting at commuter railway stations during a morning commute. One week later, they returned to the same platform, distributed the photos, and asked recipients to label anyone they either recognized or to whom they had spoken. 89% of the people recognized at least one of the individuals shown in the photos. The average commuter claimed to recognize 4.0 individuals who they had never spoken to, compared to 1.5 individuals they had conversed with. In addition, the experiment observed "socio-metric stars" who were recognized by a large portion of commuters. In qualitative interviews, commuters noted that they imagined what kinds of lives familiar strangers led and what kinds of jobs they held. Milgram described this as a "fantasy relationship that may never eventuate in action."

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