“Don’t speak to strangers!” This advice has been given to children by parents, friends and teachers for centuries and it says that we should be careful of people whom we do not know and that we should prefer to stay with people ‘like ourselves’. In the modern digital world of media ‘not like ourselves’ is the starting point of all encounters. In fact, strangers and the way they influence us are no longer a menace. Quite the opposite, we are worried when we are not connected with a good number of strangers. Recently I overheard a conversation between two people where one said he was on Facebook while the other said he was not. The funny thing was that the latter was justifying his choice while the one on Facebook found no need to explain his position. Connections with strangers, or almost so, are a lot more effective in terms of info transfer than those with friends and relatives. Precisely these contacts are at the core of concepts such as ‘network’. If we accept the stranger then an exchange of houses for the summer, the sale of a bicycle, a new piece for our collection suddenly involves thousands of times the number of people that are involved if we only accept friends or relatives or people who are like us. The terms friends, relatives, colleagues mean always less at least in terms of relationship. The issue is how close what I need in this moment is and this relationship changes from minute to minute. Technology changes our relationships. On social media people group depending on a specific interest be it antiques, embroidery, tango dancing and these groups cannot exclude strangers. If the stranger then becomes a husband or wife or friend it will certainly not be for lack of opportunity or choice but because the stranger had something that was truly special.