There’s nothing like social media to convince us we’re the center of our own small worlds. For all of the ways that sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have brought us closer to the people we know, they’ve done just as good a job of keeping us from the people we don’t.
It’s a shame, really. The world is full of interesting people we’ll never meet. People who impact our lives indirectly, but profoundly, who we don’t even know exist. A new app called 20 Day Stranger is looking to change that.
Created by MIT’s Playful Systems Group, the app (now in beta testing) partners two people, who live as far away from each other as possible, in an anonymous digital pen pal scenario. Every day for 20 days, each person gets messages alerting them to vague details about their partner’s life: When he wakes up in the morning, where she’s going, what the weather is like where that person lives. You remain anonymous to each other the entire time, until day 20 when you get the chance to send one 400 character message. It’s about as poetic as apps come. “It should feel like postcards rather than letters,” says Kevin Slavin, a professor at MIT and director of the Playful Systems Group.
20 Day Stranger’s premise is simple, but the ideas behind it touch on some interesting questions about how technology and social media, in particular, impact the way we see the world around us. Says Slavin, “This is about addressing a fundamental human question, which is: How can we become aware of all the people in the world who we are connected to but may never meet?”
Slavin and his team designed the app to require as little input from the users as possible. Instead of us telling our partner where we’re going and what we’re doing, the app draws on the wealth of information that’s readily mine-able on our phones. Using the iPhone’s M7 chip, the same chip that uses accelerometers to inform fitness apps, Slavin’s software is able to recognize when the phone moves and how it moves. This means the app can accurately alert your partner when you’ve woken up, if you’re walking, driving or running, and where you’re doing it.
Potentially creepy stuff to be telling a complete stranger, but Slavin says they don’t keep any of the data on hand and they strip it of anything that would give away specific details like exact location. So instead of telling your partner you’re on the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway in New York City, they’ll just get a Google street view image of some place in the vicinity of Time Square.
“Part of it was thinking so maybe there's something actually beautiful that your phone can know everything about you,” says Slavin. “Maybe that’s what gives us the opportunity to allow someone else to imagine you. Not to pinpoint you. Not to get every detail and every data-driven nuance in order to sell you a different brand of vitamin. But rather to get the texture of your life.”
It’s a strange way to approach social media, when you consider how much detail we’re used to sharing. The goal of 20 Day Stranger then, is to find a balance between no communication and the onslaught of detailed information we share on places Facebook and Twitter. “What we’re trying to do is trying to use the info we can gather to produce something that lives between information and imagination,” he says.
For the more romantic among us, this arrangement allows us to piece together a narrative about someone's life. It encourages active daydreaming; for every kernel of information you receive about someone’s life, it prompts multiple other questions: What did she had for breakfast? Did he take their children to school? I wonder if she’s having a good day?
But Slavin says the app’s goals go beyond the esoteric. It’s also an experiment to see how relinquishing fixed identity can impact the timbre of our digital relationships. “Every time you open up a channel for people to engage with each other anonymously, it’s a really effective way to get the worst aspect of the species to be manifested,” he says. He believes 20 Day Stranger can be the opposite of what apps like Secret and Whisper have become. It’s hardly an apples to apples comparison, and you could argue the only reason 20 Day Stranger won’t devolve into a cesspool of negativity and gossip is because the app doesn’t allow us to talk to one another.
So far more than 25,000 people have signed up to try 20 Day Stranger. Right now, the app is only being tested on the iPhone, which creates something of a diversity problem. You can make all sorts of assumptions about how different iPhone users across the world are, and it’s true—until the app is available for Android, its reach will be limited. “That’s a big big priority for us to do that as quickly as possible,” says Slavin.
Regardless, the app does a good job of reminding us that we’re not the center of all human experience, which is actually a pretty impressive accomplishment. “It’s really really demanding on the human mind to properly imagine the lives of strangers around you as being just as dense and important as your own,” says Slavin. “And yet, of course they are. What will you do in order to produce that consciousness for yourself. I want this to be a tool answer that.”
