“Cause if you’re not really here,
then the stars don’t even matter.
Now i’m filled to the top with fear,
that it’s all just a bunch of matter”

Australian musician, openly gay, and singing to some very sexy beats — Sam Sparro had a hit song with “Black and Gold”. You can watch the snazzy video full of suits, stretch limos and moody lighting: Sam Sparro — Black and Gold (I would usually embed it, but the option wasn’t available for this video).

Academic / activist Danah Boyd is known for her research and talks on social networking sites, and her blog, apophenia. On her website, she makes an interesting note regarding her sexuality:

Although i had hooked up with girls in high school and been introduced to dyke culture through the Internet, i started really exploring what it meant to be queer in college. I never really had a “coming out” event or an emotional breakdown — it was more a process of trying to resolve the politics, the culture and my own attraction to people of different genders. I don’t think that i found a resolution, but the process led to some amazing conversations and exploration. To this day, i identify as queer and have never identified as either lesbian or bi; the former is simply not true and the latter implies a binary gender segmentation that is not true of my experiences. I very much attribute my comfortableness with my sexuality to the long nights in high school discussing the topic in IRC.

from a bitty auto-biography / a smattering of facts

I rather like the way she looks at things.  Anyway, now that we’ve established the link of Danah’s sexuality and Tilted World’s theme, let’s move on to the reason behind this post.

This video shows highlights from Danah Boyd’s talk, Living in Public: Danah Boyd on Social Networks:

“Social media expert Danah Boyd discusses how social networks like Facebook and MySpace have shifted private life into the public, resulting in a revised set of social norms”
from Fora.tv

For those who like what they see in this video, head on over to the full video of her talk, In Search of Belonging, along with discussants Susan Kish, Marc Canter.

“Private is a controlled space where you have an audience”.

For some thinking moments on the difference between our private and online personas (and I’m sure quite a few non-heterosexual people have very different images in both spaces).

I quite like the talk — any talk that states Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) could be the Anakin Skywalker (Darth Vader) of social networking sites makes it easy for me to like . Er. This video has nothing directly related to sexuality, but there are issues here that you can apply for discussion.