![]() Many are sleeping or staring off into space. People on the New York subway, maybe just a quarter have headphones in. There's a lot of conversation about technology and what it's doing to our relationships, but in this particular instance of interacting with strangers in public, it is not as dramatic an intrusion. In an age when we've got our heads buried in our tablets and earbuds in on the commute home – when people stare at their phones like zombies when they walk down the street – are we communing with strangers less than generations past? Stark spoke with The Globe and Mail from New York about the "beautiful interruption" of talking to people you don't know. We seem simultaneously fixated on and completely wary of strangers today. All this as hordes continue to mass-empathize with the strangers featured on Humans of New York, photographer Brandon Stanton's ongoing blog of portraits and intimate interviews with people he approaches on the streets of that city and all over the world. ![]() Others sounded a wider alarm, including MIT guru Sherry Turkle in 2015's Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, and developmental psychologist Susan Pinker in 2014's The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier. Urban connection and loneliness have tranfixed authors and readers in recent years: Olivia Laing embraced its particular sting in New York in this year's The Lonely City and Toronto's Emily White combatted it with a year-long "belongingness challenge," described in her 2015 book Count Me In. Then there is what Stark calls the "density of purpose" of cities to contend with: the frenetic pace, the deadlines, the overtime, the errands, the gloating busyness.Īll this resistance, even though "cities are machines for interaction among strangers," Stark writes. As children, we grow up hearing about "stranger danger " in adulthood, we fear breaking tacit codes around appropriate public behaviour. ![]() In an insular and hostile world, Stark may be one of the last to relish this particular social challenge. For Stark, talking to random people helps rupture her daily routine, rapidly builds empathy and offers the unique thrill of gleaning something real about someone she's never met before and probably will never meet again. Stark is a big believer in talking to strangers, be it the corner-store clerk, a guy manspreading on her subway car, a dog walker out for a moonlit stroll in her neighbourhood or a man sharing her elevator who is wearing beautiful shoes. ![]() That anecdote, which belongs to a friend of hers, is just one poignant example of many. They didn’t need to know each other,” writes Kio Stark in her book When Strangers Meet: How People You Don’t Know Can Transform You. “It was a moment of connection with a stranger that felt real and good. ![]()
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