ABSTRACT
Growing up in suburban Los Angeles, I always had a unique embodied relationship to space and how space affected relationships. Los Angeles has a unique way of communicating space to its residents. For me, as with many of those living in the area, relationships were always connected through the roads and highways, thus dependent on automobile travel. As a child, my father would pick me up and drive me an hour to his house in Orange County to spend weekends with him. In fact, any social connection was initiated by getting into the car and traveling. Many years later, as I was working on my Ph.D. at UCLA, I began to translate these spatial gaps to the world of online social networking. As online social networking began to flourish in 2003, I began to connect with people globally and find some very fruitful relationships that simply extended the distance paradigm I grew up with even further. Though there was a significant amount of space between my friends and myself, the means to connect was simply an altered form of getting behind the wheel and driving. Through technology, the spatial gap that existed in every relationship I had known was easily traversed. Connecting globally felt natural.
