How much time do you spend talking with strangers?

October 8th, 2009 by Justin Kistner

Social media is one of several options for communicating with other people. In an informal survey around the office, I was asking people how much time they spent talking with people they don’t know on the phone. I also asked how much time they spent on social media talking with people they don’t know. I don’t want to taint results, so I’ll just ask all of you the same question.

Social media usage


Phone usage



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7 Responses to “How much time do you spend talking with strangers?”

  1. Sabrina Says:

    I do tech support and social media and I don’t have a lot of real life friends so I might skew the results… haha

  2. Justin Kistner Says:

    Sabrina, you are totally going to skew my results!! ;)

    Perhaps I should have made an option for people to share their profession…

  3. Trenton Says:

    Between /. , Stackoverflow, and comments everywhere else (like here) I’m at least 50% talking or reading people I don’t already know.

  4. Justin Kistner Says:

    Trenton, I’m with you. I only recently considered Facebook to stay in touch with my real life friends. I’ve been surprised how many social media users do not talk with strangers though. Wonder if that’s a matter of time and eventually they will, or if we are the exceptions to the rule?

  5. Carri Bugbee Says:

    I used to talk to strangers WAY more before Twitter changed the @Replies protocol. It’s not as easy to discover new people now. You have to go looking. But I think my percentage is still rather high. :-)

    @CarriBugbee

  6. Justin Kistner Says:

    Carri, I dislike the change in the @replies as well. I wish we were working on a standard for micromessaging to make more room for innovation and preferences…

  7. Marya Says:

    Wait, what do ‘know” and “strangers” mean anymore? Do you mean, talking to people you’ve never interacted before in any medium?

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