
Conducted in the early 60s, "the Milgram experiment" (as it's come to be known) was basically concerned with the recent past: how Nazi Germany could have happened. It's likely (though not certain) that people today would question the white-coated psychologist's authority more readily and stop the torture more quickly. But Milgram did some other famous experiments which are more relevant to our times, experiments into social relatedness that delight today's researchers into network theory, social networking sites and bluetooth phone technology. In the 70s, Milgram came up with two big ideas, the "six degrees of separation" idea and the "familiar stranger" idea.
Familiar Strangers are people who aren't totally unknown to us, but aren't acquaintances either. We might see them every day on our commute to work. We have a sort of unspoken pact with our Familiar Strangers, a pact not to communicate, even though we may recognize each other. This isn't an unfriendly pact, we simply agree to maintain anonymity. It's a pact basic to city life -- in the interestts of sanity, streamlining, simplicity we agree to stay "visual but not verbal" with most people, even though we might know them by sight, and even have invested quite a lot of energy in imagining their lives. Milgram's study was based on two projects he conducted in 1971, one at CUNY and the other at a train station. He published the results in two papers, "The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity", 1972 and "Frozen World of the Familiar Stranger", 1974.

There was an element of perplexity in Milgram's attitude to the Familiar Stranger, something that links it to his electric shocks experiment. How, he wondered, could people be so cold and indifferent to their fellow human beings? "Fellow commuters, he decided, are like trees, posts, and billboards -- regarded as scenery, not as people with whom to talk and exchange greetings. Milgram called these people familiar strangers, for they encountered each other daily but never introduced themselves. Instead, they stood in clusters, back to back, staring straight ahead. "I found a particular tension in this situation,'' he confessed."

The Familiar Stranger idea is one that interests me. I'm not one of those people who reads about this and resolves to talk to his Familiar Strangers in future; I'm quite happy to see the agreement not to communicate as essentially a harmonious one, part of the smooth running of the large modern city. I don't particularly like to clutter up my day with chatter, and I don't think urban alienation is particularly a "problem". In fact, Milgram's experiments come from a time when alienation was a fashionable theme for sociologists and psychologists, perhaps because it was fashionable in humanist literature. Books like David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1953) described a large subsection of Americans in almost Existentialist terms: they were a "lonely crowd" of other-directed individuals equipped with a sort of internal radar which made them "capable of a rapid if sometimes superficial intimacy with and response to everyone". In Riesman's terms, I'm more of an "inner-directed" -- having to do this "rapid, superficial intimacy" thing is a bit of a torture to me. I prefer to daydream about people than chat with them.

This sort of speculation is one of the pleasures of Familiar Strangerdom. If you make it public, though, you run the risk of being confronted by your Stranger. When I wrote something earlier this year about sitting next to an avant-garde artist called Shelley Hirsch at a concert in Ausland, I somehow didn't think that Shelley herself might read and be hurt by the piece, which details a Familiar Stranger encounter with her. But when I saw the Milgram Reenactment at Kunst-Werke recently Shelley was there too. She recognized me and introduced herself. "Remind me where we met?" I said, failing to recognize her. "We didn't, but you wrote something about me that was very hurtful," said Shelley. We patched things up somewhat, but not before Shelley had accused me of being "arrogant" for eavesdropping at Ausland rather than introducing myself directly. But that's not my style; I'd much rather eavesdrop. I'd rather preserve Strangeness than get too Familiar. Half of that account, though, is about me familiarizing myself with Shelley's work when I got home -- and liking and recommending it. And that's my ideal way to relate to people, through their work. Sure, it only works with artists, but it's something that's expanding as we all become more media-active, as we self-mediate on the web. It's possible to follow non-artists now in the way we once might have followed artists -- through their media trails.

Don't get too familiar, stranger!