The vital art of talking to strangers

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That’s not the message of the cartoon at all. Quite the opposite.

Go away. Stop talking to us. We don't know you.

Haha this is totally just social anxiety. Both ends actually. The belief that the girl next to you on the train is thinking you’re cute and ignoring her and the belief that she’s gonna react like that.

A real version of that comic would probably have her thought bubble be like “I hope the meeting at five doesn’t run over. I’ve got to go pick up that camera lens from Best Buy. And what’s traffic going to be like. Should I just get it shipped? Hmm, I wonder if it’ll make it here before the weekend. But I want an excuse to get out of the meeting. Is that too much? Maybe.” or something like that. You know, the same stuff you’re thinking.

I have stranger-interactions all the time and most people are actually fairly eager for them. In fact, about the most you’ll ever see is lack of interest, which occasionally happens but will manifest as them being minimally civil.

Most people don’t want discomfort anywhere in their vicinity so they won’t confront you. Like they will barely confront you if you cause them harm, they _definitely_ won’t confront you if you’re neutral.

Perhaps the problem with social media is that it’s not social. It’s actually oratorical media. In a physically social setting, people do the thing the article quotes: they recognize that interaction with diametrically opposing viewpoints is possible if they exercise tact to eschew controversy until having built common ground.

That isn’t possible at scale because there is no common ground at scale. And online, everything is at scale. You are definitely talking to everyone.