Brandon Stanton is confident in his ability to get strangers to open up to him when interviewing them for Humans of New York. He obviously has gained a great deal of experience throughout the course of HONY, along with a lot more recognition. I found it interesting that he now has trouble getting people to be as free and nonchalant with their responses just because they know who he is, where their story will end up, and the widespread audience that will read it. The fact that he is still able to solicit genuine responses from these people is a testament to his skill as an interviewer. However, I would like to get some insight on how he managed to get the interviewees to trust him with their stories when he first started out. Did he appeal to their egos by telling them why he was compelled to document their existence? Did he catch their attention by thoroughly explaining his purpose? Or were people willing to share the details of their life with this stranger just out of pure curiosity?
The other video, “Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer,” was very informative to someone like me who is a novice at interviewing people. I appreciated the parts of the video where the experts told stories and showed examples of what not to do when interviewing a subject. I also found the choice of the word “sing,” which was used to describe the way a subject may talk when they feel that they can be open with the interviewer, to be interesting. This description made sense to me, because now I think of interviewing as the interviewer listening to a cacophony of uninteresting noise, straining to hear a glimpse of a tonal melody. This image fits with the readings from Telling True Stories and Stanton’s HONY, since everyone seems to be trying to find a needle in a haystack–the perfect story in a long stream of words.
What a great way to think about it.