Yesterday was Halloween. A day when it is acceptable to have perfect strangers knock on your door and ask for candy. I love it. My wife and I had so much fun handing out candy last year, we decided to take the experience one step further and move to the front porch. We set up a table and had dinner with some friends while all the little tinkerbells, vampires, skeletons, pirates and various other creatures made their way up our front steps to get some candy. My favorite trick or treaters were the little ones with their moms coaching them from the sidewalk whispering, Say "trick or ‘treat." Say "thank you." Then they would carefully walk down the steps saying "bye-bye, bye-bye."
There’s a subtle but palpable difference between being inside and being on the front porch. The front porch experience is about me hanging out at my place, but making myself available for spontaneous interactions to happen. I’m likely to see people I know, but also likely to see people I don’t. It’s a lovely sort of limbo between private safety and being in the public eye. Many times I’ve quickly grabbed the mail in my underwear because of that very sense safety. The things I see while I read a book or take my lunch on the porch, I would have missed if I were inside. I’m watching the world go by and participating in it at the same time.
What I’m getting at here are the little nuanced ways of interacting in a community. We’re building an online community here at Spout and so we spend time thinking about how the real world and the digital world interact. At an online community, like MySpace, I get frustrated because I can only do a few things. I can keep track of what people are leaving on my page-kind of like calling up a friend and catching up-and I can do a search, which is like leaving my house to go across the street and ring on a neighbor’s doorbell. I can also check out recent activity, which is kind of like watching strangers walk by in the mall. But I can’t have the Front Porch experience.
Maybe there is no paradigm for the Front Porch in an online setting. It’s something I’ve wrestled with and can’t seem to come up with a clear alternative. It seems like all of my online experience jumps between being either totally private, or frighteningly public. But the Front Porch has become a valued part of my real world life. I don’t think I’ll ever buy a house without a front porch again. It’s a stretch, but what we’re pushing for at Spout is an experience like living in a neighborhood with a bunch of people who love film, walking up and down the sidewalk while I sit on my front porch with a sandwich and say "Hi."
4 Comments
I hope I don’t make anyone upset with this one….
Front Porches didn’t always exist. In the beginning we had the city experience, where eveyone was clustered together. A lot of people lived in area on top of stores. Rural areas were spread so far apart (farms and such), that even people that had front porches couldn’t really get a front porch experience, because no one would just happen by their front porch.
The Front Porch Experience (one of my favorite bands of the 80’s, by the way) EVOLVED over time, and it may be difficult to create one from scratch at the start. Certainly, Myspace seems to have little new things pop up on my home page all the time. Maybe eventually something online will evolve into a FPE, but it definitely going to be difficult.
However, there’s more bad news. The FPE grew from one important development. Zoning regulations. As new societies built in the spaces between rural and urban, new zoning restrictions created designated areas where people live, and where people work.
The separation of home and mall led to the FPE, in creating more single-family dwellings, and closer knit communities. But, at what cost? Certainly the fact that no one can walk to where they need to go anymore is one of the costs, which means less exercise for American, more pollution in the form of more cars driving anywhere. I seriously wonder sometimes if the car or oil companies weren’t behind the concept of Suburban Sub-Divisions.
To bring it back to spout, I think the separation of home and mall is exactly the opposite of what you guys are trying to do. Commerce is important to you guys, and not just because you’ll probably be in the business of selling things to people. It’s important to you that good filmmakers make their money back, and make MORE movies.
I’m not completely sure how all of this information relates back to spout. Just offering up the way I see the situation.
Why Nat, you have stumbled onto one of my favorite topics: the origin of suburbs. Some would argue that suburbs are the result of Federal Home Loans given out liberally to veterans of WWII upon their return to the states. But they were given under the condition that the veteran was purchasing a single family, stand alone home. This restriction obviously lent itself to suburban dwellings. Factor in the booming automobile industry and you’ve got suburbs.
But before the Second World War, we have the Arts & Crafts movement. This movement was about simplifying the home from the Victorian era and integrating it more with nature and it’s surroundings. Therefore the front porch was an important part of the Arts & Crafts movement. It was looked at as an extension room from the home into the outdoors. So my neighborhood, built in the 1920’s, has a very walkable and neighbor friendly feeling, but is still urban because it’s walking distance to a “main street” downtown area.
Anyway, fun stuff. I really like your point that the FPE (thanks) is maybe just evolving in an online community. You are right, front porches were an evolution coming out of a certain demand for new ways of living in a neighborhood. I guess you could argue that people moving from apartments were looking for a way to keep interacting with their neighbors. Or maybe they just wanted a cool spot to sit in the summer time.
Another thing to keep in mind about front porches (I wonder how many people are yawning out there–I happen to love this kind of discussion) is that air conditioning and television weren’t around when Paul’s neighborhood was built. Porches were a necessity on summer evenings, as the outside air cooled while the home’s interior held onto the day’s heat. Sitting out on your porch was also a way to catch the local news (or at least the gossip) from a neighbor.
Today we are drawn inside to our climate-controlled environments, hypnotized by our hundreds of television channels. Suburbs boast homes with only decorative front porches at most, and giant backyards enclosed by privacy fences–if you want to be outside you can do so without opening yourself to the world. There’s something to be said for that, but I think there’s more to be said for putting yourself out there. Maybe the way to approach this analogy for an online community is from the opposite direction: Figure out what the online equivalent of a privacy fence might be and try like crazy to make sure Spout doesn’t become an enclosed suburban nightmare.
I suppose that means that smokers have a societal advantage since they are the dominant porch sitters of the day.