Who is a stranger when individuals can make their publicly accessible digital profiles easily available to any interested parties?
The first question is how people will initially share these. They will almost certainly be available for public searching, but that does not mean that one will find them until they see them in public. However, this in itself is quite an interesting assumption. What leads me to believe that the preeminent modes of meeting people will remain the same: through the more “real life” social networks (work/family/ethnicity/religion) and the random encounter facilitators like bars, festivals, and the occasional speed dating events? The accessibility of this information should make the process of searching for compatible relationship matches (romantic and otherwise) far more efficient. The countering argument is that this impersonal form will not be sufficiently attractive to compete with the age old ways. However, as many of today's online examples have shown, there are plenty of format alternatives on the horizon that can both simulate the real world and provide potential enhancements to the standard functionality and interactive elements.
It is a researchable question as to how individuals trade their personal and contact information nowadays. It was a vast change when individuals were able to give one another their phone numbers so that they could be remotely contacted for more information. Personal phone numbers, cell phones, and email addresses all furthered this march of connectivity. As an aside, I imagine there was a time when no one needed to be much appraised of anyone's contact methods because literally everyone knew everything there was to know about everyone else... with the exception perhaps of the very occasional itinerant stranger. This goes all the way back to the recitation of one's kinship bonds and the part of the town or village that they lived in. However, the advent of social networking systems and their increasingly complex “profiles” (dossiers) make these leaps look more like small steps. It is fundamentally different for an individual to give someone a means to find them again for communication than it is to provide them access to a wealth of information about themselves and their associates.
It remains to be seen what protocols will be developed for the exchange of such information and the modularity of permissions the giver might be able to place on the receiver, but it is a safe bet to believe it will be high. The mechanisms will either have to be subtle or very socially normalized. In the former case, I mean that the receiver would not know exactly how much they have not been allowed to see and how much they have been denied access to for unknown reason – an easy way to lead to insult or at least insecurity about the judgments that had been passed on them for one reason or another. In the latter, people would know exactly how much is “normal” to share with someone they have just met, based on their social indicators (age, sex, etc) and the perceived chance of threat. Right now, in Eastern nations with more formalized interaction styles and highly valued business cultures, the quick exchanging of visiting cards (business cards) among first acquaintances is already de rigeur. It certainly will not be long until these cards themselves disappear or are transformed into digital keys that provide access to the identity and relationship information of an individual. It is already happening through mobile phones and microformat technologies (like vcard). Young people also exchange their “names” on sites like facebook and myspace, which is another way of exchanging info without the actual transfer of data. If openID and similar protocols succeed in aggregating personal data in centralized online spaces, all one will need to give out is their “handle” with correct spelling.
In the west, we have not yet come so far, but expect that the embrace of “smart” mobile phones will certainly lead us there. What is uncertain is how such exchanges will be negotiated, or altogether avoided. There will of course be “traditionalists” who do not wish to participate in such mechanized and transparent processes which will seem to them strip the mystery and enchantment out of initial contact. However, this reactionist prediction is the easiest to make and perhaps the hardest to defend. The likely scenario will not be everyone is the room touching antennas together and then retreating to corners to browse and digest the information they have come by to make their next move based on it. I would contend that not much will change when we engage a random person in a social milieu. We will still have greeting formalities including name exchanges, handshakes, attempts at witty banter. What may be diminished is the emphasis placed on locating the person just met in the widest social contexts: work, friends, place of residence, etc. These are all actions intended to uncover basic compatibility measures as well as security matters – justification for a persons presence at a particular time and place. I for one would be more than happy to see the importance of these primary information angles reduced, having been a perpetual stranger for long enough to grow tired of having to account again and again for who I am and why I am here/there. Sure, it can be fun to play coy and evade simple responses to these questions, but even that grows quite routine after awhile.
Thus, I have come to the place I had originally wished to start from: the end of the stranger. Yes, there will be holdouts, but the vast majority of people will be up for exchanging their data in quick and easy ways with others. In fact, they will be far more likely to share it than people currently are with their phone numbers. Also, the interrogation process for holdouts will become even be more intensified now that a safe and easy mechanism is available and it seems that their evasiveness is perhaps covering for something potentially more unnerving. However, for someone like me who wants to be transparent, but not have to answer the same old questions incessantly, this could be a real boon.
However, I think it is very possible that attendants at events will become more highly screened. I was thinking of a web application for social event management about a month ago and came to the conclusion that it would be easy and highly beneficial for people to see where each other are. Think of the basic idea of twittering from a party. This is essentially the same thing as making or taking phone calls from friends at other parties who report to you how “hopping” one place or another is. To complement these subjective reports, it would be easy to log voluntary guest lists. Anyone who wanted to be found could simply record their presence at a function and thus not have to field those “Where are you?” calls. People might very pursue unknown individuals' profiles before they arrived at an event. They might even take a look at the larger demographics of the attendees. Think of it as a “perfect information” situation – one could take into account an index of party attributes (location, cost, atmosphere, attendees, etc) and weigh them against one another when making decisions about where to spend their time.
This is a good time to touch on the power of location. The word from the tech sector is that all services will be geo-integrated very soon. This is fine, but it doesn't change the fundamental nature of the services themselves. Especially in terms of social networks and individual-to-individual interaction, I think it has less importance. Now, I'm not saying that geographic proximity isn't still quite primary in relationships, but that it has assumed a different character in these new models of association. I once heard a pitch for a belated product called “the pointer”. The premise was that through a pen shaped device that functioned as both a transmitter and receiver of a unique signal, people could point it at individuals that they found attractive and have their information discretely transmitted to them for later review via a proprietary (subscription based) social networking service. I skip the myriad problems with the business model and technological shortsightedness in favor of skipping to the heart of the matter. Is this how we will interact in the future? I argues that this was a device meant especially for the painfully shy, but perhaps I was wrong. Isn't this kind of behavior just a Facebook “poke” translated into the “real” world? Yes, but it adds in real time geography. So, instead of people tracking and reporting their location constantly, like some GPS enabled cell phones are already offering, we will take this alternative. Is it slightly less invasive, or more so?
