Fear of entering strangeness dissolves upon first contact with another person

Evidence

I just swing my purse and walk and have a good time. I don’t really feel like a lot of people really feel, strange and encumbered, because it’s such a big place. I really like it … It’s so intriguing, there’s always something around the corner that you find and I like to experience it, a lot of times by myself. You also have the possibility of encounters with different people when you’re alone. I was thinking when I’m in public places by myself, I’m always apprehensive at the stan of it and then once I become involved in it and I can interact with people, immediately it’s smoothed over; just to meet someone, make a contact, establish some kind of play between you, then I’m fine; but it’s always the initial step of stepping into it that is always difficult when you go into a strange place. … Urbanites, as this interview extract suggests, are not always busily engaged in “avoiding” the city. The city may also be, for those with the knowledge and skills to make it so, a setting for adventure; a place to confront new and diverse people and situations; a place to try out new and diverse identities. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 930

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to the reader’s core tension: the initial ‘apprehension’ of entering public anonymity is broken not by withdrawal but by making contact — relevant to how Cole’s observer might be rescued from isolation.
• QUESTION: The threshold dynamic — hard first step, immediate smoothing — suggests an empirical question about what exactly the ‘first contact’ provides psychologically.