“Stranger Danger” not so dangerous

The video “3 Year Old Crying Over Justin Bieber” is exactly what it sounds like—four minutes of a cute little girl sobbing and lamenting her love for Justin Bieber. Like all things Bieber, it was viewed millions of times. It popped up on newsfeeds and in conversations, always as something hilarious. Indeed, a little girl crying over Justin Bieber—a celebrity, a stranger—because she doesn’t “get to see him all day,” longing for him to “be one of my family,” is absolutely hilarious.

But in a way, it’s also rather poignant, because that three-year-old girl is on to something big. We’ve come to find love and happiness in strangers—valuing their time, opinions, and talents as if they were old friends or members of the family. Our pop culture is built on adoration for strangers, and those strangers are increasingly not high-powered celebrities—like Justin Bieber, as in the three-year-old’s case—but our own peers. We watch reality shows about real people and identify with their real conflicts. We laugh at viral videos starring real people. We carry on dialogues with real people online—on message boards and comment threads—for entertainment’s sake, for an emotional connection.

These anonymous interactions have even come to replace familiar ones. Why join a common interest club on campus and attend weekly meetings if there’s an even larger online community active all the time? After a bad day, we’re more likely to cheer ourselves up with videos of laughing babies or people dancing poorly than by knocking on a neighbor’s door. When we need advice, our first instinct isn’t to call our best friend, but to search Yahoo! Answers. We’ve outsourced real social impulses—diversion, emotional catharsis—previously fulfilled by friends and family to strangers.

It makes sense, then, that a little girl might confuse a stranger such as Justin Bieber with a family member she sees every day, and the reality of this situation is devastating. The truth is that our real-life interactions don’t allow for strangers to occupy the same space friends and family do. There’s still a stigma against friending people you don’t know intimately on Facebook, or talking to people on the subway or in elevators—“stalker” or “creep” being some of the words that get thrown around toward those who do. The tension is inevitable—we’re emotionally drawn in by strangers online and in pop culture, but socially forbidden from acting on those desires in real life.

Perhaps the problem is that the definition of “stranger” is so inextricably linked to definitions of “family” and “friend” that we’ve outgrown. Our inherited Core tradition defines family according to lineage, and friendship as an exclusive contract between two perfectly matched souls. A stranger, someone outside of this structure, is inherently dangerous and threatening.

As college students, however, we have not only the family we left at home but also the family we created in college—roommates who help us with the dishes and take care of us when we’re sick. Likewise, we aren’t expected to have a single Patroclus to our Achilles, one person whose every virtue matches our own. Instead, we have a wide variety of friends that match the wide variety of our interests and passions perfectly.

And so, without tribes or clans, there’s no reason to view strangers, as the Core texts do, as barbarians with strange habits and customs, to be feared or conquered but never befriended. As our relationships grow more fluid, no one is an outsider and anyone can be a friend.

Much has been made of the Social Experiment’s supposed failure—true, no new, lifelong friendships were borne out of questions with one-word answers like “jacket.” But maybe the possibility of a lifelong friendship isn’t the only reason to talk to strangers. Maybe it’s about removing that definition of a stranger as someone different, to be ostracized—to weaken that instinct to tune into an iPod or pretend to text at the sight of someone new.

We have a lot of excuses to hide behind when we call someone a stranger—that being a New Yorker means ignoring people, that it’s cool to be aloof, that it’s fake to begin conversations with people you don’t know. But what we’re really doing is creating divisions between people that don’t really exist, limiting ourselves by geography and status and the random luck of the draw that declared that one person would be in your CC section and another would not. And ultimately, we’re preventing ourselves from being fully sincere, both with the friends we’ve made in real life, and the strangers we encounter on the way.

Aarti Iyer is a Columbia College senior majoring in creative writing. She is the editor-in-chief of The Fed. Culture Vulture runs alternate Tuesdays.