Architecture and Social Media: Closer Than You Think.

I started to wish that I went to school for architecture about a year ago when I started noticing that people are making really beautiful spaces. Spaces that look like nature, that look futuristic, that look comfortable or austere, spaces that really have personality. There are restaurants in trees and now people can live in places we never thought we could live.
I guess it makes sense that I'm so interested in this complete customization of our habitat since I am amazed at how we can choose exactly what kind of life we want from who and how we date to which kinds of food stores we frequent. These buildings that we spend our time in are a reflection of our lives and becoming more and more so as architects play with different materials and look at things from environmental and lifestyle perspectives.
Artist Andrea Zittel says it best when she says "someone told me that when you look at the buildings of Frank Gehry or Steven Hill, you can tell the version of software used to design them because there are certain things that those software programs enable, and other things they don't allow. The software gives you a rule set that predicts what is possible" (Surface Magazine).
The minute I read it I realized that all of the new social media tools predict what is possible as part of our technnology culture. The communities, sites, and blogs that we are "living" in are changing the nature and rythms of our communications.
Example: How many friends do you have now that you have never met? How many different subjects have you been able to dive deeper into and learn more about as a result of bloggers bringing you constant and up to date information?
So in a lot of ways, not only are the buildings around us changing in cool ways, (vertical gardens? Buildings that breathe better?) but our technology landscape is doing the same to allow us more communication freedoms.