Here is my reaction to this essay on doors on the Urban Computing Blog:

It has always seemed to me that a door, beyond being a physical construction, is often a social one. A physical door can in fact be locked needing an actual key to enter. But it can also be metaphorically locked, blocking access to certain people based on a conceptual social structure, not because of physicality. As a child, I'm sure most of us remember someone saying that the point of doing well in school was so doors would open for us as adults. (this touches on the idea of a door being closed forever..."what if were to never open again"). But what happens when these social doors are closed for the wrong reasons in the wrong contexts? This seems particularly relevant when considering how a physical door translates into a virtual one. Perhaps virtual keys are not simply previously registered personal information and a virtual door is not simply a login page. Perhaps the key is also educationally and socially based and access is limited to those who meet certain criteria of exposure and economic status. If you don't realize the door exists you can't even begin to find the key.

The idea of a virtual key is interesting because it most often involves some kind of exchange of personal data that is archived in places that the initial 'user' has no control over. To gain access to many 'walled' websites we have to provide our names, email address and other forms of personal data. By being unable to control what happens to these keys we are unable to negotiate our own terms of personal space and privacy. In the physical world a door is the intersection of two functionally different places, most often crossing the boundaries of what we identify as publicly accessible and what is private (either to an individual or to an identifiable group). What if the keys to our apartment were available to third parties at any time without our knowledge?

Physical doors are also social indicators of neighborhood. This door is different then this one. They can sometimes symbolize the importance of being able to (and to what degree we need to) protect personal space in certain environments from people that aren't supposed to enter. My parents live in a relatively small and quite safe neighborhood in Westchester County. They very rarely lock their front door, so rarely that neither me nor my sister have an actual key to the house. This does not mean that they are inviting the world in. Sometimes a door does not need to be locked to imply "do not enter". I've lived with roommates and we never locked the doors to our bedroom, but it was implicitly implied that you would never simply walk in. What happens, however, when an unlocked door allows for intrusion, either because the door is left unlocked accidentally or because it is broken?

In 2001, I lived on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, which was and still is a very Arabic neighborhood. It was actually the place that I enjoyed living in the most of all the neighborhoods/apartments/cities I have lived in. My apartment building was right across the street from a Mosque. A few weeks after September 11th, someone (or some group of people) entered my apartment building and spray painted racial slurs all over the lobby and stairwell in part referring to the Mosque. The lock on the front door of the building had been broken since I had moved in there a year earlier but nothing of that nature had ever happened before. It was actually very disturbing, and most people in the building felt that way. Even though the lobby was simply an entrance way and no one ever congregated there, many people I spoke to seemed to feel that their personal space had been violated. The weekend after it happened, a bunch of us got together and washed the walls because the landlord seemed disinterested in arranging it himself. When I returned to the building in 2005 the lock was still broken.