The NYTimes briefly references how i relate properties of an environment to notions of architecture and i thought i’d expound on this since folks have asked. First, these ideas are based on language used by Lawrence Lessig when discussing four points of regulation in “Code”: market, law, social norms, and architectures.

So much of how we structure our social interactions is dependent on our understanding of an architecture. In the physical world, this element is constant. There are certain properties of the physical reality that allow us to assume certain social norms. Without technology, i assume my conversation is ephemeral. I can visually and audibly determine who overhears me. That said, generations of fiction have been created out of the problems with this assumption… what if the walls are listening? what if someone is in a secret passage way and can see you? what if?. But in a truly dialectic form, those questions only emerge because the majority of time, you understand who can see/hear you.

Everything changes online. The architectures of the digital world are constantly shifting and being redeveloped. Technological determinists tell us to get over it: everything is public. But the digital public is so conceptually different than the physical public. People don’t yet know how to operate in a space where everything is persistent, searchable, etc. More importantly, we’re engaging with people *now* and can’t even imagine what new architectures will form 10 years from now that will repurpose our current presentation into the future in a way that is quite different than we expect… even in the “public web.”

This is why Friendster intrigues me. Friendster is an example of that shifting architecture. The majority of users on Friendster don’t have blogs (or journals) and aren’t really present on the web. They are the Internet users who thrive on searching the web and using email. Thus, they are naively negotiating what it means to put up public data. They are forced to face some of the questions about how shifting architectures impact their presentation of self.

At the same time, Friendster also shows how you cannot take sociological and anthropological theories generated in the physical world and expect them to work online. 1950s sociologist did not imagine that the foundation of their work, the underlying architectures, would shift. They assumed this to be constant and thus most of their work needs to be re-conceptualized with architecture as a variable.

And this, this is why i’m having fun.

Graffiti is one of those things that evolves over time in a city. When you see a graffiti wall, you know that there are layers of paint below it that express that city’s ever-changing reality.

My friend Cassidy Curtis has been in awe of this phenomenon for ages and he put together a fantastic website entitled “Graffiti Archaeology” to allow us to navigate a city wall over time. He’s been photographing walls and collecting images over time to compile these composites. Plus, now that it’s hit the web, different artists are starting to donate graffiti images to him. [If you have graffiti archives, definitely send them his way!]

I really like this project because it takes advantage of the digital medium’s ability to see temporal data in any order. Thus, you can see how the different graffiti elements have impacted new drawings, have been repurposed, or have been obliterated.

by Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes
(posted here with permission)

Years ago, when we were young and new to the city, we called them “orphan Thanksgiving dinners.” We were beginning our careers, scraping by as artists or working as waiters and we often couldn’t afford the expense or time to make it back to family for the holiday. At the beginning of November those who knew they would be stranded in town spread the word and one by one friends of friends would make themselves known. When Thanksgiving Day rolled around the card tables placed end to end could not hold us all and many would be forced to couches and the edges of beds to balance paper plates on our knees.

The dinner was always potluck and there was always too much food. One year a table actually collapsed under the weight of the offerings. Many of us tried to recreate the tastes of our childhoods in our efficiency kitchens. We called home for family recipes, the more ironic the better. Someone would bring an elaborate Jell-O dish with Cool Whip and canned pineapple or a sweet potato casserole with mini-marshmallows. These dishes were partly spoofs on our middle class suburban upbringings but they were often eaten first because they reminded us of home.

After dinner a few friends would bring out their guitars or we’d read a play someone had been working on with each of us taking a part. We took rambling walks through the strangely calm city. There were more calls home to mothers for advice on how to remove wine or gravy stains from the couch. The celebration would stretch into the night. No one wanted to go back to his or her apartment alone.

It was years ago that we called those gatherings “orphan Thanksgiving dinners.” Something about them changed as my friends and I reached our late twenties and early thirties. The celebrations became more formal. The paper plates and coffee mugs were replaced with real, breakable dishes and matching wine glasses. Rituals formed over the years. Friends now wrote songs and rehearsed plays specifically to be performed at Thanksgiving. The after dinner walk had a specific route through the park.

Our tastes became sophisticated, as did our cooking skills and the once haphazard potlucks turned into multi-course feasts. There would be portabella mushrooms stuffed with Brie cheese and artichoke hearts and butternut squash risotto with shavings of black truffle. A few up-and-coming gourmands became serious about their sauces. The yearly pie contest became brutally competitive. (Although there were half a dozen blue ribbons from “Best Crust” to “Most Creative Use of Fruit.”) There was still too much to eat but one of us had bought a house with a dining room and a sturdy oak table that could seat us all and handle the weight of the food.

But those weren’t the changes that mattered. What mattered was this: We could now afford the time and travel expense to make it home to our kin but we chose not to. More precisely, the very idea of where home was had changed in our minds. What had begun as an affiliation of friends of friends – a stopgap measure to support us during our time living outside of family — had become the central social structure in our big city lives.

Looking back at my twenties, I can now picture us as explorers in a new social landscape where it was suddenly the norm for both men and women to spend ten or more years living single, far away from our families and hometowns. No one told us that we were going to delay marriage longer than any generation in American History and no one gave us a map for how to navigate that time. Faced with the social wilderness of the city we slowly forged communities among our friends. Years ago we gathered haphazardly because we could not make it home to family. This Thanksgiving, my friends and I will come together reverently with a desire to honor our group with this particular holiday. We give thanks for this self-made community and for the certainty that we are orphans no longer.

danah note: this essay made me smile. I will be spending my Thanksgiving with my SF crew cause i can’t afford to go back east. I wrote to my mom asking for her stuffing recipe, because we’re doing a potluck feast. This is my first Thanksgiving (and was my first birthday) not spent with the family. And i’m looking forward to the shared festivities and the blended rituals.

A friend of mine is highlighted in an article on Flash Mobs for his research in the area.

Dear unknown audience:

My apologies for my recent absenteeism on this blog. As the term is nearing the end, my attention has been slightly diverted to thinking about Vannevar Bush (vs. Emanuel Goldberg), SCOT, Erving Goffman, reputation, mobile/camera phones, CHI, meta-blogging, etc.

I promise that i will come back with interesting commentary on the social networks space shortly, but if you are really bored and looking for danah babble, feel free to follow my non sequiturs at http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/