Don’t talk to strangers. It has been the advice passed on from parent to child for generations. Now, it has morphed with the internet with warnings about not revealing any personal information to people you don’t know online. Yes, there are bad people out there and everyone needs to be careful what they say. On the other hand, life is made up of taking risks. At one point, my wife was a stranger to me, yet we met online and later met face to face. In this case, talking with a stranger was one of the best things I ever did.

One of the stereotypical complaints of geeks is that they live in their parents’ basement and have no friends. Either that, or they have thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook; friends that are little more than strangers, gathered as some sort of score keeping in a social media game. A recent Pew Study: Facebook Users Have More, Closer Friends, dispels this myth, but comes as no surprise to many of us who have established many friendships that started online.

people who use Facebook several times a day average 9 percent more "close, core ties in their overall social network compared with other internet users."…

How do we reconcile all of this? To me, life is about taking risks. There is a risk to meeting new people, whether it be online, face-to-face, or starting online and moving to face-to-face. There are also rewards. Instead of a ‘just say no’ approach to meeting new people, we need to talk about how we establish trust in the people around us. Not everything that a person tells us, online, or face-to-face will be true. Nor, will all of it be false. We need to work on critical skills to determine if what we are reading, what we are hearing, or what we are watching is true. Some of that, we learn by experience.

My earliest memory of meeting someone face-to-face that I had only known on the Internet is from Halloween, 1982. My roommates and I had a party and I posted an invitation out on the Usenet. Several people that I knew only online, attended and it was great to meet them. Today, I am talking about going to a barbeque with a friend that I’ve only met online. We have over forty friends in common, mostly folks interested in some intersection of progressive politics, journalism, social media, technology, non-profits and health organizations. There is a risk that the barbeque might be a flop, but if my skills at getting a sense of people online are any good, then I suspect it will be a good gathering. The reward outweighs the risk. If I’m wrong, it will give me more information in helping me make better choices next time.

So, what do you think? How do you determine if the reward of building friendships outweighs the risk of talking with strangers? What strategies do you adopt in mitigating some of the risks or maximizing some of the potential reweards?