Martin Douglas Hendry

What is it?

20 Day Stranger is an app for iPhone that has been developed by MIT Media Lab’s Playful Systems working group. The app is a peer-to-peer sharing app which partners you with a stranger for 20 days, allowing you to share information with each other about your life. Over this time period the app tells your phone to collect a range of additional details such as when you wake up (using the accelerometer), as well as if you’re in transit through the use of GPS (this also lets your “partner” know how fast you’re travelling too.) At the end of the 20 day period you are able to send the person you have been matched with a single message. Images that adorn this information are scraped from Google Streetview, obscuring the activity enough for the user to remain anonymous. The app as it stands does not allow for first hand sharing as director Kevin Slavins suggests such an approach would have “a tendency to bring out some experiences that are negative.”

Rando however is an image-sharing app which is designed specifically to allow strangers to share images with each other – and offers an interesting counterpoint. Rando users take a picture and then receive one shortly afterwards in return from a randomly generated sender. (You image is also sent to someone else entirely separate). More often than not this results in international exchanges. When experimenting with Rando, I have received images from Asia, South America, Europe and America. From my experience the negative aspects Kevin Slavins infers are rarely seen in Rando exchanges at this time (although there is an issue that will be discussed in the next section).

Both of these are examples of applications that allow you to share with strangers on a 1:1 basis.

Why is it important?

Image-sharing has become a diverse and significant activity within cultures of technology. We are able to (1) send images to specific targets with as much as ease as (2) broadcasting them to large groups of people. Typically when we send an image to a designated target this will be someone that we know directly, and this will be completed using a messaging app (as there is a need to have their specific contact info). Both of these activities typify today’s dominant image-sharing activities.

Where we share with more people (i.e. a Facebook post, or on Twitter) there may be an understanding that some of the people who are exposed to the image in their feeds may not be known to us. This is something we can describe as a semi-public sharing – and it may affect the way that we share the image (if at all). In addition to this we may share an image in public streams (i.e. sharing an image on Instagram using a hashtag) – this is undertaken on the understanding that people that we do not know at all will receive the image. Again, this understanding may have an impact on the kind of image shared, as well as the desired response from recipients.

In all of these cases, as we broadcast wider (i.e. as we want more people to see the image) we may understand that this is where people that we do not know as well (if at all) may come in to contact with the image. If we wish to get to know people this could be seen to pose a problem as this is comparable to getting to know someone you have not met at a party, but having to break the ice with that person with everybody else listening in to your conversation.

Significantly, until the likes of Rando and 20 Day Stranger (and perhaps dating apps which use image sharing) – dedicated image sharing with the people we do not already know have operated on the basis of “broadcasting” rather than peer-to-peer. It is likely as such, that more intimate (or candid) sharing is less likely. Why this is significant to social sharing we will cover in the next section.

20 Day Stranger from Playful Systems on Vimeo.

How might it affect the Social Camera?

Public Sharing and Ideal Online Identities

Sharing on-line is different from sharing with people in “real life”. In a physical conversation with someone we can make mistakes, say the wrong thing and be exposed time and again by our body language. Online – in most case we are allowed some freedoms that allow us to construct our identities. To clarify – we can select which images of ourselves we allow to be tagged to our profile, we can share content which correlates to our beliefs (or at least the beliefs that we wish to share with our peers and the public) and we can even design every single word we say to others, whether in a private message, or a blog post. An easy way to understand this is when you think about the tightly composed email that you send your boss, as opposed to communicating the same material to them caught unawares in the corridor.

Today, on-line there are a number of tools on-line that have made sharing more human (such as notifications when people are typing, or when an image has been seen by its recipient). However, for the most part, online spaces have become places where we find ourselves having to maintain personas (if indeed we feed into them at all.) This is one of the main benefits of Snapchat (that people have discussed with me) compared to other image sharing apps – namely that people feel that they can “be themselves” more when the images do not linger afterwards. We are all human after all.

This means however, that the way that we share with people we don’t know is likely more reserved, toned-down – and ultimately less human. As when we communicate to the crowd, we find ourselves having to adhere to convention. Rando and 20 Days Stranger are significant in the sense that they are largely unprecedented ways of genuinely connecting to (without the caveat of hooking up) people that we do not already know. In a word that is becoming increasingly connected – we should be sure that the connections (and services) we design between people bring people together, rather than stave them apart.

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There are a couple more critical aspects to this that I may revisit later – but for now I will leave this post as it is.

What do you think though? Leave a comment or start a conversation with me on Twitter at @mdhendry