Kaminer’s piece, Taxicab Confessions, written after the second day of a new cab-sharing program in Manhattan brought to mind some fascinating research I uncovered when working on a chapter about how relationships unfold.  It helps explain what makes sharing a small space with a stranger so intimidating and, at the same time, why we sometimes break all the rules and let it rip with someone we just met, even in a very short period of time. 

The Small Space Issue

Long ago, the famed sociologist Erving Goffman observed the many ways people have of defending themselves against strangers in public: putting belongings on an adjacent seat, burying your nose in a book or newspaper, and, more recently, talking or texting on your cell.  And in the absence of such props, we practice “civil inattention,” by staring blankly, acting as if we’re not really looking or listening. Kaminer hits on this in her piece, referring to an unwritten rule of cab-sharing: “shut up.  If anyone tries to speak, politely ignore her.”

But, as anyone who has shared a crowded elevator or subway car knows, civil inattention is a little trickier in small spaces.  Forty years ago, anthropologist Edward T. Hall theorized four human “distance zones” that correspond to increasing levels of closeness: public (twelve or more feet), social (four to twelve), personal (four to eighteen inches), and intimate (eighteen inches or less).  Some modern social scientists dispute Hall’s theory, because it doesn’t allow for individual variations in how close people stand in conversation.  But it seems to explain why most of us feel so uncomfortable in elevators, subways, or a shared taxi where we’re less than four feet apart from a stranger.

Indeed, Kaminer found that she couldn’t entice anyone to share her cab at first, even after offering to pay the full fare! And yet when she finally shares a few rides, she encounters the recent college graduate and others who are shockingly willing to share themselves and wonders,  “Why were New Yorkers so reluctant to share a cab and yet so willing to share everything else?”

Breaking the Rules of Self-Disclosure

Self-disclosure is the engine that drives new relationships. In the “initiating” stage,we size up the stranger and ask “safe” questions that we’re willing to answer ourselves–background, values, details of everyday life. As we move into the “experimenting”  stage, disclosure broadens–you touch on a number of topics. Depending on the circumstances and the two people involved, disclosure can quickly become “deep” and more revealing as well. It usually takes time to build up trust. Clearly, chemistry and common interests can hasten the process. But it also matters  where you are–and who’s next to you.

Psychologist Zick Rubin identified the aptly-named, “stranger-on-a-train” phenomenon, in which we disclose personal information to people we don’t know and probably won’t see again. We can talk about ourselves without worrying that it will get back to the people closest to us. Rubin also conducted studies in bus terminals and airport lounges that suggest we’re more likely to tell our troubles to a stranger if the other person opens up first. It’s like the old you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mind game that kids play.

Kaminer doesn’t reveal what she disclosed to her fellow riders, but perhaps identifying herself as a reporter was enough to get the ball rolling.  Or perhaps it was the cab itself.  After one of her co-riders tells Kaminer he sees “nothing odd about cab sharing,” he proceeds to reveal details of his life that she is sure he wouldn’t share with subway riders: “…he is on his way to his therapist’s office, which is on the same block as his wife’s therapist’s office and right next to their couple’s therapist.  Ever gotten that much information between subway stops?”

To be sure, such off-the-cuff sharing happens at the gym, in a cozy neighborhood bar or cafe–or in any type of public or commercial “being space,”where the environment is conducive to hanging out and chatting. Of course, we are more likely to open up to those closest to us, but relationship researchers find that we are also inclined to offer up bits of our private selves when we’re set apart from others, when we feel safe, and when we feel like we can get away from the other person if we need to.

So far, cab sharing in Manhattan doesn’t seem to be catching on. On the day of Kaminer’s experiment, the only takers were other journalists eager to write about the experience. Not to worry, you can still tell your troubles to the cab driver.

In Greenberg’s social convoy (as in all of ours), are people who ride along with her as she makes her way down the road of life–individuals and clusters of people from a particular realm, such as the office or, in this case, the apartment building where Mindy and her family live.  She writes about “Little  Louie,” her 58-year-old a doorman who drove a red motorcycle to work.  When he is critically injured in an accident, Greenberg and other residents and staff visit him in the hospital where he lay unconscious.  There she runs into his daughter.  Greenberg shows her the cards her sons made for Louie–artifacts of caring.  The doorman is an important part of their social convoy, too.  When a fellow first grader teased one of her sons, calling his artwork “scribble scrabble,” Louie taught him how to draw.  The daughter is not surprised; her father was “great at drawing…great at everything.”  Greenberg writes:

It feels intrusive getting this glimpse into Louie’s personal life, when I’m so used to it being the other way around. Louie always knew who came and went. He even knew when I returned from chemotherapy every other Tuesday three years ago, offering his usual smile and a kind word. A natural pessimist, I was still persuaded when he would say, “It’ll be fine, you’ll see.” I want so much to be able to say the same thing to him now.

I’m beginning to realize how little I know about him. I think he’s in his late 50s, that he hails from Puerto Rico and now lives in the Bronx, that he has a girlfriend whom he met when she worked in our building as a nanny. I know that he loves his daughters and grandchildren, and they love him. All the children love him, especially the two little girls who live on the first floor and like to call him the Grouch while he teases them and makes them giggle.

Such is the paradox of consequential strangers.  On her deathbed, Greenberg won’t be saying, “I wish I had spent more time with my doormen.”  Louis is replaceable. But he is also a one-of-a-kind, a person who changes her day in small, wonderful ways.  And he is a vital part of her everyday comings-and-goings.  This paradox is even more dramatic where there is an “assymetry,” as Greenberg calls it–a relationship of unequals. Theoretically, we save our tears for close relations, but when Greenberg leaves the hospital, learning that her doorman’s prognosis is grim, she is “red-eyed.”  When she walks down the block, knowing that his red motorcycle won’t be there.  She misses it; she misses him–and yet hardly knew the man.

Little Louie is the employee; it is his job to be friendly and courteous–for Greenberg it was optional, and yet she valued the relationship.  She understood that he mattered.  After sharing the depressing news with three other employees of the building that Louie probably won’t survive, she challenges a long-standing social practice in her building:

Suddenly, I turn back around and say what I’ve wanted to say for 15 years. “Would it be all right if you called me by my first name? I know it’s not policy.”

“I would like it, actually,” Big Louie says. “We’re all family here.”

George and Elliot say they’ll do it, too, if that’s what I want.

“Yes, please. Call me Mindy.”

In a few words, Greenberg blurs the social boundaries and lets her consequential strangers know that they matter.  It is a fitting tribute to Little Louie and and expresses an important social and spiritual principal:  Relationships needn’t be painted as as “close” or “not-close,” but rather as meaningful.

I thought I was a Real Estate Broker, but the last few years it’s been all about desk top publishing/marketing and advertising via social networking. Makes “hauling & hoping” not look so bad after all!

So now what?  In the piece I admitted, for all the world to hear, that I felt as if I was no longer a writer, but a publicist–to which a former editor, after telling me that she enjoyed the piece, added these two sentences:

I love that you’re becoming a writer again.  I was starting to run from Melinda the Publicist

I’m not surprised.  I was getting hints of that from friends.   I wanted people to see what I had seen in the research, to appreciate the power of their own social convoys.  Clearly,  I had overdone it!

So now that I’ve metaphorically raised my hand to announce, “I’m Melinda and social media has made my life unmanageable,” what does “recovery” look like? Where does my admission leave me–and this blog?  Here’s what I learned and what I plan to do:

Right-size. I’m not going to abandon all social media, but I will put it in perspective.  When I’m on line, I chat, answer emails, research, read emails, play Lexulous on Facebook–much of it is social time.  I’m soaking up information or  exchanging ideas.   Just as I’d schedule a trip to the library, or an appointment with a colleague–and wouldn’t spend five hours in either place–I will plan and allocate my Internet time as well.

Balance. It’s not all bad.  I have connected with tens (that’s not a typo!) of new people through Facebook, Twitter and this blog–people whose ideas resonate with my own, people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.  They are younger or older, they live all over the world, and I love the exchange of ideas.  One of my new social media buddies captured this–in 480 characters:

I just read your article. I agree that we can easily fall into the “hype” and lose track of other things. But, without that hype I may not…have found Consequential Strangers. That “hype” has allowed me to appreciate the people in my life who I didn’t realize mattered. I have…also met tons of other people who have changed my thoughts. So, thank you for the Hype! I look forward to more in 2010.

Broaden. This is what you can expect in 2010. I will continue to tweet, write, and comment, here and on other blogs, but I won’t just write about consequential strangers.  (That said, almost every discussion involves social connections!)   But I needn’t limit myself.   Right now, in fact, I’m mulling over a post entitled, “Sixty-five Is the New Black.”   (Don’t ask. I won’t tell.)

Sometimes it’s hard to trace the origin of my various online connections, but I believe that Jason, who writes the Caffeinated Conversations blog, found me through the Gumption blog by Joe McCarthy.   In turn, I found Jason via Google Alerts, when he tweeted Joe’s review of CS.  What a great example of the wonderful, serendipitous, and sometime overwhelming connections we make in cyberspace!  We’re geographically and sometimes ideologically worlds apart. But somehow we manage connect.

Therefore, Jason’s question is right on target.  What is your dream?  Given this culture of continuous connection, what do you want your social future to look like?   Following Jason’s entry, in which he put forth the idea that through conversation we can change the world for the better, was Megan’s comment, in which she said,

I think if people are able to share ideas and cultivate relationships, it’s great, but really, there is no electronic substitute for talking with other human beings face to face. I have started referring to online “friends” in quotes, simply because I grew up with a different definition of what a “friend” really means.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself.   I  jumped right into their conversation, both to describe my own dream and because Megan’s need to put quotation marks around “friend” is precisely why we need new words to describe our  relationships–and not just our online contacts.  This is my comment:

Megan, a way to describe at least some of your online friends is to think of them as “consequential strangers”–people other than family and close friends. But I’ll bet that many of your online exchanges are with people you know in both contexts–on and off line.

My dream is that we stop calling online relationships “virtual” and questioning whether they’re “real.”  My dream is that we begin to appreciate and value all relationships and to think of those that matter, in small or great ways, as “meaningful,” regardless of where we meet or how deep the level of intimacy.  Our social ties span a continuum, from stranger to soulmate, but because close ties have been studied more and, until recently, talked about more, acquaintances  somehow seem unimportant.  But they’re not.

Implicit in Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech was the idea that once we all look past the outer trappings, whether skin color or status, and dare to cross traditional lines, we will be better able to appreciate our similarities and see our differences as benefits.  And every bit of research I’ve uncovered over the last three year confirms this as well: The more we “integrate” our lives will all sorts of people and all sorts of relationships, the healthier, happier, and more successful as humans we will be.

I worry about the perils of online socialization, too.  But if we’re conscious and careful–if we learn to manage our (relatively new) online lives so that we reap the benefits of having so many others to call on–the advantages will outweigh the risks.

Besides, the genie is out of the bottle:  Every day we make new connections at an unprecedented rate and volume.  We consume tens, maybe hundreds, of byte-sized morsels of “conversation”–through emails, in chat rooms and on bulletin boards, and via social media.

Perhaps this avalanche of acquaintanceships will overtake us.  Or perhaps we will look back a few years from now to realize that many of the definitions we grew up with have changed and we simply had to adapt (for better and worse) as earlier generations had when newfangled technology threatened the status quo.  Either way, we’re all standing on the same hillside.

Why CS are now more important than ever. We’ve always had them, but today the world is too complex, our lives too busy, to depend on intimates alone.   CS impact health, success, and our sense of who we are.

Where we find them. New York is filled with “being spaces,” some of which I’ve written about on this blog: “dog runs and other mini-communities,  the High Line park, an everyday bus route. Cafes, laudromats, OTB parlors, the new Times Square promenade, Brant Park–they’re all places where strangers can become consequential strangers.

How casual relationships develop (and sometimes deepen) – the role of gossip. CS meet each other on common ground–based on interests, local, or need.   Casual conversation, gossip, and mutual self-disclosure can move us along the continuum from strangers to soul mates.  What are some of the markers? Check out the  “Friend or Consequential Stranger?” test.

The future of CS relationships–on and off line, in our homes, schools, workplaces, and communities. In the last ten years, the Internet has grown and with it our consciousness, our connections, and our ability to collaborate.  In the first decade of the 21st century, we’ve already witnessed dramatic changes in the way we “do” relationships.

No one is too young or too old to understand the power of casual connections.  Here’s one of my favorite consequential strangers, Zelda, age 98:

For a few years I’ve been going to the Village Zendo every Friday for their midday hour-long sit.  For various reasons I haven’t been able to go since before Christmas, until today.  Among all the many people who have come and gone to that session, there are four of us who have gone every Friday since I started.  Besides me there’s an older guy whose name I’ve never learned who dresses mostly in orange and seems to do nothing but ride his bike around all day; a younger guy named Larry who runs a music club and comes straight from bed (at 12:30); and a middle-aged guy named Bill who is a follower of the terribly obscure Gurdjieff.  We only talk for a few minutes before and after, and never see each other anywhere else.  I realized today that those guys mean a lot to me.  Seeing them, talking to them briefly, week after week reliably in that setting.  And I know that I wouldn’t have appreciated them with as much awareness as I did today if I hadn’t read your book.

(I posted Guy’s email in CS Stories, too, because I didn’t want it to be missed.)

Kris Miner blogs about “restorative justice“–and in one of her posts, applied the concept of consequential strangers to that process:  “What occured to me…was the power that Restorative Justice volunteers/community members bring to others.  The volunteer community members come to RJ, sit in Circle with those court-ordered to attend.  Really deep connections result.  The power that happens is shared by everyone in the Circle.  The authentic conversations, the self-awareness in a group setting really connects people.”

Chris Kilber reminded me that we often don’t think about our own impact on others whose paths cross ours–until years later. In his blog, he recalled a casual acquaintance: “…even though he was just one person I knew those many years ago, we had made differences in each others lives.”

Joe McCarthy, gave me a great new term: speed-dial friends “who are there for me when all I need is a witness – someone will listen with empathy, and withhold judgment – or when I need an active adviser – someone who will share his or her insights, experience, strength and hope.”  Joe also recognized the importance of CS–on and off line.

Last (for now) but certainly not least, Ashley Boynes astounded me with her courage.  Twenty-six years old, she’s the Community Development Director of the Arthritis Foundation of Western Pennsylvania Chapter of the  documenting her sometimes painful and often frightening treatment for rheumatoid arthritis–she’s had it since age 10–and is a teacher, a role model, and an inspiration for others who must travel a similar path as she shares “the ups and downs, the trials and triumphs, the good, the bad, the ugly, the successes, and my personal hopes and fears as they relate to my condition.”

For those of you who don’t know him, Gary is the reigning master of Twitter and YouTube, a knowledgeable and genuinely nice guy–which is why everyone likes him.  They might not know him in Hollywood, but he’s an A-list celebrity on the Internet, the one to “follow” if you want to know what the fuss is all about.    Mostly, he’s a man on a mission, living his dream. And he thinks there’s room for everyone–well, anyone with a passion, knowledge, good social skills, and a willingness to put in the hours.Gary’s book, Crush It,  is #265 on Amazon at this writing.  I’ve already recommended it to my literary agent, my daughter who’s expanding her business,  a longtime publishing colleague.    It’s required reading for people who haven’t a clue about the role social media in the 21st century.   And if you read between the lines, you’ll also see that Gary is the master of his own social convoy.  He keeps his loved ones close, makes them a priority, but also responds to everyone who contacts him and really connects with them.   He’s a new media guy with old-fashioned values.   And he’s spot on about the “thank you economy.”

Giving acquaintanceship due recognition seems to have had to wait for the relatively recent development of a sociology of the everyday, and the author explains how acquaintances ‘are part of the process of “building up a sense of the everyday in time, space, practices and orientations to the world.” He’s concerned to get us thinking more positively about the role that acquaintances play in our lives, especially in the cosmopolitan context; and to assert that they are necessary for social life to exist at all.  “It would be difficult,” he writes, “to describe or account for social life without them.”

Harris also provides a link to very interesting program (although he would call it a “programme”) produced by the BBC Radio 4 series with Laurie Taylor, Thinking Allowed.  It features David Morgan along with Henrietta Moore, a professor of social anthropology, discussing the importance, historical precedents, and special benefits of acquaintances–the type of relationship Karen Fingerman dubbed “consequential strangers.”  Happily (for me at least), Harris provides a link to this blog at the end of his!

On a related note:  Whenever I hear an award winner say, “It’s such honor to be in the company of the other nominees,” I roll my eyes (sure, you have to say that to act humble), but now I stand humbled myself.  To be on the same list as Frans de Waal  (Age of Empathy),  Doug Rushkoff (Life, Inc.), Michael Chabon (Manhood for Amateurs), Tim Brown (Change by Design), and other forward-thinking chroniclers of modern life is, indeed, an honor.