photo by giant_mice_kill_rabbits

A new study has found that 36% of people under the age of 35 Tweet, text, or check Facebook right after sex. For the over-35 group, that figure drops to only 8%. Are we totally giving away which side of the 35 dividing line we are located on when we say, Seriously, people? That’s really what you want to waste your post-coital warm fuzzy glow on?

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I know many queens who for whatever reason feel the need to hide their sexuality from their boss or their mother. Before the days of Facebook this was an easy thing. But now as we are connected via social networking sites, our bosses and our mothers are often times linked to our lovers. This could become dangerous for those trying to keep some things in the closet. Facebook has amazing security functions. You can keep things like photos and profiles, including sexual orientation, hidden to certain folks.

But that’s not going to keep your secret hidden, honey. Two students at MIT used what I’d consider common sense to test a theory: can the company you keep, even if online, accurately predict sexuality? The simple answer is yes.

The Boston Globe writes of the students: “Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively ‘outing’ themselves just by the virtual company they keep.” Via Andy Towle.

Yes, I am a sucker for stupid YouTube videos and blogs that take me away from real work. You must be too. Why else are you reading this?

This video, done by Throw’d TV, had me LOLing. Or better yet, LMAOing. It is a send up of an all too familiar story these days: the Facebook break up. Be prepared to laugh. Really hard.

Here’s your weekly run-down of breaking green tech stories…

• Need a reason to spend more time on Facebook? Timberland and changents.org have you covered with their new game Earthkeeper Heroes: Mission Possible. (via sustainablog)
  
  

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Mashable, the site devoted to coverage of the social-media industry, posted a cool report about SplashCast, a widget that adds revolutionary commenting capabilities to offerings from Hulu and other online video providers. It’s easy to add a comment to the discussion thread on, say, a YouTube page, but SplashCast, or “Social TV,” as they call it, is different.

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This is a weekly column written by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson, two filmmakers and film professors who are wondering where modern storytelling is heading.

I’ve been thinking about the number of people who are streaming their lives as open stories over the web. All these personal narratives are unfolding by short sentences or photos or blog entries on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Flickr. How does this proliferation of millions of bite-size stories affect the way we generally experience, understand and create story and our life?

Big questions. I surely don’t have all the answers but let’s look at “geriatric1927” on YouTube. It’s Peter Oakley, a pensioner from England, who made his debut in 2006 and has since become a major YouTube star with more than 47,000 regular subscribers. His first video, book ended with blues music, has been viewed about 3 million times! In looking through his stuff I was taken by the fact that so many YouTubers respond to his posts, either in writing or with video, creating an endless chain letter of intertwined personal stories riffing around a theme.

For example if you look at his post Response to Cookalong the Geriatric Way, you’ll see that he is actually responding to Gordon Ramsey’s Cookalong Challenge (a chef and TV personality with a YouTube channel). Peter’s “geriatric” approach to cooking primarily involves a bit of humor, a glass of wine and a microwave. Also this video inspired responses of its own… including Cooking with Jon – a young man making a strange looking desert out of 3 packaged ingredients.

I wonder if part of our fascination with these tiny (sometimes mundane) episodes of people doing what they do is not about what’s actually there… but what’s missing. Suspense is created by the sheer shortness of it… and as we ponder why today’s photo on Flickr is melancholy and yesterday’s was goofily happy, we anticipate what might come next. I’ve been talking about suspense a lot in one of my classes and reminding my students that suspense fuels stories, whether thrillers, romantic comedies or documentaries. As long as we wonder what will happen next, we are engaged… we are imagining… and in a sense we are participating, even collaborating, with the story. This is addictive whether on the level of a Hitchcock masterpiece or perhaps even in the trickle of updates on a Facebook page.

And what about the truly collaborative open stories? Will we see more of these in the future? One that I love just by the sheer variety of people and their creative ingenuity is Google’s Collaborative Video… a true video chain letter (complete with envelope) passed through impossible time and space…. over high peaks, underwater, through people’s heads and more. I know it was a promotional stunt but… watch it below.

-LR

Image: NASA

On its 39th anniversary, Earth Day still feels vital to me, but I know that some of you out there think that its time has passed. Every day should be Earth Day, you say. Choosing just one, single day to say you care about the planet we call home — what good is that?

The first Earth Day came at the end of a decade in which social activism drove this nation’s political agenda. Moved by a desire to create that better world, we got together to fight for change the only way a large group of like-minded people could: we laced up our shoes and walked side-by-side. When you have to get together in person, well, you obviously need a specific day to meet up. And that day turned out to be Wednesday, April 29, 1970.

Some of us who fought for this country’s first environmental protections make the mistake of assuming that because young people today are less likely to be found marching down the National Mall as the shopping mall, that they must not care as deeply as we did when we were young. But apathy has not replaced idealism. Idealism just looks a little different these days.

This generation uses new tools to express itself and influence political decisions. They connect with one another in more ways than we could have imagined back in 1970: blogs, email petitions, YouTube videos, Twitter and Facebook. They’re finding new ways to express their political views, and they do it every second of every day.

Lately, I’ve come around to their way of thinking. I’m still standing up for environmental protections for the places I hold dear, but like so many of today’s new activists, I’ve hung up my marching boots and taken to the blogosphere. You’ll find me expressing my views at the Huffington Post, NRDC’s Greenlight, and Sundance Channel.

So what good is Earth Day? It’s a day that reminds us to take a stand every day and fight for the places we hold dear. So today, pause for a moment and take full advantage of the unprecedented array of tools we have for connecting with others and expressing our views. Speak up on Facebook, or Twitter, or go one step further and join me at NRDC’s Greenlight. In today’s world, you’re a reporter too. Stand up for the people, creatures, and lands that inspire you to protect the environment. Reach out and tell the world about what’s happening in the places you hold dear. Make your voices heard.

At 9:45pm Tuesday night, an old friend from my hometown called me from London, where he has been living for the past several years. Since he expatriated himself our communication has been confined to annual visits in Berkeley during the holidays, occasional emails and every-now-and-then spontaneous chats on Facebook. But I made him promise to call me directly from his mobile if Barack Obama won. Our post-personal forms of communication would not suffice for such a moment. I needed to hear is voice—another assurance that this would be real, not virtual.

Fifteen minutes before our show was to go live, I saw the +44 number on my cell phone, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick up. I was not ready. It had taken me most of the election cycle to let hope sink in; it was going to take at least Virginia and Indiana, if not the entire electoral map, to believe.

I felt emotionally jet-lagged. I found it difficult, if not impossible, to digest the news of an Obama victory with hours still left in the day. Taking this news in was going to be the emotional and mental equivalent of trying to eat dinner at seven in the morning, or to wake up for work when it’s still dark (I realize this is not an abnormal experience for many, but for those of us who work in entertainment, this is a highly disorienting and unsettling task). My only experiences as a voter in presidential election so far had been filled with frustration, disillusionment and a sense of betrayal. I had also grown to expect to stay up all night, or all month, waiting for results.

About an hour later, at 11pm, Jon Stewart called the election for Obama. But our show is a comedy show, so I turned to my computer and went to CNN, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, FOX and all my favorite blogs, and sure enough, within minutes, they were calling the election for Obama too.

I still couldn’t exhale. These were just projected wins, the polls in the west coast were still open and it would take forever to count all the ballots. What if in some freak turn of events, California went for John McCain?! I was not about to get comfortable only to have the rug ripped out from under me.

I grew up in the generation of cynicism. I was born a week before President Ronald Regan was sworn into the White House. Recent history taught me that glory doesn’t last. My parents’ heroes, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X had all been assassinated. I watched Los Angeles Police officers beat Rodney King and saw racism re-emerge as riots broke out throughout the country. I observed so many of the civil rights that my parents’ generation had fought for—such as Affirmative Action, immigrant rights and educational equality—get taken away. By the time I was a senior in high school, all my advanced classes were filled with only white (and some Asian) students, and the University of California in Berkeley which had been the epicenter of diversity in higher education, had banned affirmative action.

My parents, along with about half of my friends’ parents, had divorced by the time I started first grade. Even in California I was faced with roadblocks because I was of mixed race. As a young actress, casting directors and my acting coaches told me I was very talented, but that I should not invest hope into a career in acting because, as my acting teacher put it, “there are no mixed-race sitcom families.”

My experience growing up in the wake of great leaders and Free Speech showed me that hope was delusional and processed only by insulated radicals who made it their business to estrange the general population rather than find a way to include it. I was living in a Berkeley bubble of skepticism and disillusionment. To hope and to believe was something for wash-up hippies and religious fanatics.

Shortly after 11pm last night, I heard a familiar voice emerge from din of the after-show chatter in our office. It was McCain [ap.google.com]:

Thank you. Thank you, my friends. Thank you for coming here on this beautiful Arizona evening.

Please.

I gathered around one of our dozens of televisions in the office with a small crowd comprised of comedy writers and producers and world-famous comedians, all of whom had spent the past 21 months/eight years cracking jokes at the hypocrisy, irony and foolishness of the political game. But for the first time ever, we all watched McCain’s speech in silence. Some of us cried.

At that moment, before midnight on Election Day, my thoughts and feelings were genuine, authentic, and raw. I believed.

Only a few times in my life had I felt such a powerful, sudden onset of a brand-new emotional experience: pride at my Bat Mitzvah, grief when my grandmother died three months later and true love when I fell in love for the first time three years after that. But all these experiences had been contained to my past of more than a decade ago.

At twenty-seven years old, for the first time in my life, I couldh hope and I could believe.

The experience was not an easy one for me emotionally, however. Walking through the dark, three-in-the-morning streets of Manhattan’s meatpacking district on the way home from our Indecision after party, I didn’t quite know how to place my feelings. I was using a muscle I had never used before as I attempted to process the world around me. Strangers on the street cheered; we smiled and yelled out “Obama” to one another as crossed paths. “Obama” would not just be the name of our next president, it was becoming a universal greeting, like a handshake or bow, that signaled that we are looking out for one another and we are heading into the future together.

I felt to sleep at four in the morning applying my newfound hope to thoughts about changes I want to make in my personal life and in my community. If we can do it, I thought, than I can too.

–Jamie Wong