If you’re just joining us, here’s the top 5 things that happened here this year:

1. Why Iron Man Is The First 21st Century Superhero
For the past 70 years we have been living with a 20th century version of the superhero. Until now. Though the Iron Man character was originally created in the early 60s, his most recent incarnation is really the first Millennial superhero. (Then Jon Favreau, the director of Iron Man, retweeted it!! Craziness!)

2. The First 21st Century Vampires
Just as the new Iron Man has broken the mould constricting the superhero archetype, True Blood’s vampires offer a compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman relationship to it. (MetaFilter gave it love, too.)

3. How The Internet Killed The Rock Star (…Not The Way You Think)
At this point, to say the Internet’s done away with anything else when it comes to music is, admittedly, a cliché, but, nevertheless, there’s one more, less-publicized casualty: the rock star. Zoe Keating agreed.

4. Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience
“Transmedia” has become the new buzzword for multi-platform narratives, but in the digital age, transmedia isn’t just how we consume entertainment narratives, it’s how we experience the narrative of our lives. This post later became the basis for a panel with me, Marta Kagan, and Jan Libby, at the FutureM conference in Boston.

5. How To Stand In the Face of Powerlessness For A New Generation
As a generation, mine has not known powerlessness. We’ve had so little practice at facing situations where we couldn’t just do something; at fighting them, at living through them. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill is my generation’s unfortunate turn to figure out how to stand in the face of powerlessness.

Honorable mention:

The Glitch Mob Drops The New-Tron Bomb
This happened so late in the year that it didn’t quite have time to catch up, but my idea for a Tron:Legacy remix video scored to The Glitch Mob’s music and edited by Khameleon808 is still the 7th most popular thing that happened on Social-Creature in 2010. (It even got into Wired.com.)

Ps. Thanks to Boston Innovation for naming me one of “Five Fresh Faces Leading Boston’s Creative Revolution.” Though I seem to be splitting my time between Boston and LA the past couple of years, (I wish Facebook would let you put “It’s complicated” under “Current city”), it is, of course, an honor to play even a little part in any Boston-based revolution.

See you next year!!

A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930′s, and in its place offered a vibrantly modern model for the character, reflecting the unique culture, ethos, and mores of the 21st century. True Blood, I’m realizing, is now doing the same for that other undying superhuman trope: the vampire.

Of course, the vampire has been undead for a lot longer. The earliest recorded vampire myth dates back to Babylonia, about 4,000 years ago, and over the millennia it has appeared in almost every culture. But lets cut to the chase: 1922 was year vampires broke ground in film (though, technically, they’d made a few cameos before then). It was the year F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” came out.

Take a good look. That’s what a movie vampire used to be. A creature no teen girl, or anyone else for that matter, would want to see as a lead in a summer mystical romance franchise. In all the silent films that featured vampires there was always a clear and consistent view: here be monsters.

While this original archetype might have undergone a radical transformation over the past 80+ years of cinema — from grotesque monster to, ironically, heartthrob, a result of the only evolutionary force vampires are actually subject to: sexual selection, naturally — don’t be fooled. Just because Twilight’s Edward Cullen or the whatever-their-names-are characters of The Vampire Diaries happen to be getting panties in a twist at the moment, they are not in any way contemporary. Much has been made about the exceptionally “old-fashioned” gender roles in Twilight, but that analysis is basically missing the forest for one tree. Think about it: is there ANYTHING that happens in Twilight that could not have happened just as easily 50 years ago? You could turn Twilight into a 1950′s period piece and basically NOTHING about the major plot points, dialogue, personalities, relationships, or motivations — of either the vampires OR humans in this saga — would need to change. This does not a 21st century story make. In fact, if you’re curious about exactly why Twilight is so popular, the mechanics of this process are actually quite timeless:

Twilight’s preternatural hotties aren’t so much throwbacks as they are completely out of time. The story could be happening in any age; its characters’ capacity to reflect some kind of cultural context is irrelevant, probably detrimental.

The predominant Millennial quality that grounds Iron Man in the 21st century, I wrote, is transparency. In his total openness about everything from his deepest secret to his fleeting impulses he is as “post-privacy” as Facebook would have us all become. To suggest that True Blood’s vampires are uniquely modern because they too, like Tony Stark, have revealed their secret identity to the world, would be easy — it is, after all the premise that the entire show is based on — but it wouldn’t be accurate. For Stark, radical transparency is a way of life. You never have to wonder what Tony Stark is thinking because it’s usually exactly what’s coming out of his mouth at any given moment. The vampires on true blood are anything but transparent. Their secret truths and ulterior motives are consistently obscure. Tellingly, even Sookie Stackhouse, the show’s mind-reader, can’t penetrate their thoughts. Despite a superficial simulation, transparency is not really a quality that connects True Blood’s vampires to the modern age. But you know what does?

Recycling.

These vampires are environmentally conscious! Hey, it’s the  the 21st century, caring about the environment is hot! In fact, in the wake of the BP Oil Spill disaster which has affected all the Gulf states — chief among them, Louisiana, True Blood’s setting — there is a subtly startling undercurrent of environmentalism running through this season’s sublot. At one point, Russell Edgington, the 3,000-year old vampire King of Mississippi, a new character introduced this season, rhapsodizes, “I mean, do you remember how the air used to smell? How humans used to smell? How they used to taste?” Earlier, the vampire Queen of Louisiana describes a rare delicacy: “A Latvian boy. Has to be tasted to be believed. Not polluted like most humans. Tastes exactly the way they used to taste before the industrial revolution fucked everything to hell.” When Russell asks rhetorically, “What other creature actively destroys its own habitat,” one imagines these vampires didn’t need to see an Inconvenient Truth because they’ve lived it. They may be blood-sucking fiends but destroying the planet is below even their standards.

Nevertheless, consumer culture that they’ve lived to find themselves in, they’re not beyond shopping at the mall. (Looking good is, after all, a vampire priority.)

No doubt, there’ll be some anecdote about a vampire shopping online eventually. Most likely Eric will get there before Bill, I’m assuming, based on this classic exchange from season 1:

Eric: “I sent you three texts, why didn’t you reply?”
Bill: “I hate using the number keys to type.”

In fact, while Bill might be True Blood’s most conservative vampire (how postmodern!) — his education on how to be a vampire for the 17-year old girl he’s just been forced to turn into one is about as awkward and evasive as the birds and the bees talk from a religious dad — Eric is, arguably, its most progressive. That is, he has no fear of progress. Eric might be 1,000 years old but he’s as naturally at ease with his tech gadgets as any “digital native.” So far, he’s the only vampire I’ve seen use a bluetooth device. Ever.

As the proprietor of a popular vampire bar called Fangtasia, Eric clearly recognized “The Great Revelation” — as the vampires call their coming out to the world — as a great business opportunity. Entrepreneurship is an unexpected quality for a vampire in general — I mean, why bother with such pedestrian concerns when you’re immortal, right? On the other hand, what else would you do with an eternity of nights? Might as well launch a nightlife startup. According the Wall Street Journal, The Great Recession, which began in full force around the time True Blood first got on the air, is churning out ever more entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur.com reports, 8.7% of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in the second quarter of 2009, and they expect to see even more people starting their own businesses in 2010. So it’s no surprise that 21st century vampires would be business-minded. Upon visiting Fangtasia, Russell, himself a semi-silent owner of a werewolf bar in Mississippi called Lou Pines, even tells Eric, “We must talk of franchising.”

If being an entrepreneur isn’t your thing, there’s always the royal route: seizing assets from your subjects. In the vampire Queen’s case, that asset is vampire blood, which she then has other vampires move as black market narcotic. Since selling their blood is a high crime among vampires, it’s initially unclear why the Queen would be doing this. What inscrutable and ominous vampiric motives could she have? By season 3 it’s revealed that the Queen needs the money to pay off the IRS. For vampires in the 21st century, death might not be certain, but taxes are. Indeed, True Blood’s portrayal of vampire culture is more of a bureaucracy than any other cinematic depiction. After a religious fanatic suicide bomber self-detonates at a party in a vampire lair, killing a number of humans and vampires in attendance, there are, literally, forms that the lair’s owner has to fill out in this situation — a sequence that encapsulates the equally bizarre extremes of both the terrorism and banality of our age.

While just last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8 initiative, which denies marriage rights to same-sex couples, was unconstitutional, on True Blood, same-sex couple Russell and Talbot have been married for 700 years. Homoerotica is by no means anything new in vampire lore, but gay marriage?? There’s a concept that barely existed in the public discourse before the 21st century. And Russell and Talbot’s relationship is exactly what you’d expect from a couple that’s been married for 7 centuries — anything but erotic. A particularly noticeable departure for the otherwise seriously agrosexual HBO series. Of course, the new phenomenon of marriage between vampire and human — which, though legal in the word of True Blood, is still highly controversial — has, from the show’s beginnings, served as a running metaphor for “marriage equality.” Alan Ball, the creator of True Blood, as well as Six Feet Under, and the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, is not only someone who clearly understands a thing or two about the modern existential condition, he is also an openly gay man. No surprise, then that True Blood’s very opening credits sequence weekly drives home a starkly unfantastical image that connects vampires to that other minority fighting religious opposition for equal rights in the 21st century.

“Alternative lifestyle,” an often-used euphemism for homosexuality, is actually a perfect way to describe True Blood’s approach to vampirism. Even the show’s brilliantly integrated marketing campaigns have sought to bring True Blood’s fictional world off the screen and into reality by treating vampires as an increasingly visible minority with their own lifestyle brands and targeted advertising:

True Blood’s vampires even blog. Well, technically, it’s only Jessica, with her http://babyvamp-jessica.com blog, but as a 17 year-old who just became undead last year she’s the only Gen-Y vampire on the show, so obviously she’d be the one blogging — check out the awesomely pointless first few entries — 1, 2, 3 — this directionless experimentation with a new “toy” is exactly how a teenager would start a blog. (Vampire diaries?? Who the hell keeps a “diary” anymore in the age of social media? Sheesh.)

Overall, there is a deep, underlying theme about progress coursing through True Blood. “It’s vampires like you, who’ve been holding the rest of us back for centuries,” sneers Russell before destroying a Spanish Inquisition-era vampire Magister. It’s the vampires that are most hung up on the past who are some of the show’s craziest messes. The psychotic vampire Queen, who’s stuck in some perpetual 1940′s costume drama, has just been stripped of power; Lorena, whose inability to get over her past with Bill becomes her destruction; Eric’s newly-revealed 1,000 year old revenge obsession for the murder of his father will no doubt promptly lead him into some kind of trouble this season. Godric, Eric’s maker, even destroyed himself in part because after 2,000 years he could no longer bear that vampires had not progressed; that he hadn’t. Unlike the atemporal caricatures of the other franchises, True Blood’s vampires offer a uniquely compelling commentary on our rapidly changing present through their own, archly extrahuman, relationship to it. We are living in a time when change, whether we like it or not, is coming at us so fast and furious we can barely comprehend it — speaking on a panel at Techonomy last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said we now create 5 exabytes of data every two days, an amount equal to all the information created from the dawn of civilization through 2003. Who can really understand whatever the hell that even means?  True Blood’s vampires are at once representations of cultural change within the narrative of the show, and, likewise, must themselves confront a new millennium’s progress. Some adapt better than others. Some have more sinister interpretations of where progress should lead, but they, like the rest of us in the 21st century, either accept change, or deny it at their own peril.

Remember Iron Man?

You know, the little Marvel Studios franchise about a charming-yet-ironic 21st-century superhero played by Robert Downey Jr.? You might have heard about it. Considering the two films have cumulatively grossed over a billion dollars in worldwide box office sales so far, it’s highly probable that you’ve even seen it. You couldn’t miss it.

Oh?

Really?

Somehow you managed?

Well, no worries. Here. A quick crash course.

Iron Man (2008) trailer:

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Notice the AC/DC track that opens the trailer? “Highway To Hell” has basically become the official theme song for Tony Stark. So much so, AC/DC even made a special Iron Man music video for the song with Marvel in conjunction with the release of the sequel:

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And you think, seriously?? Is this actually happening?!

The Megamind wiki page says that originally Robert Downey Jr. himself was slated to be the voice of the supervillain (now voiced by Will Ferell), which would have, perhaps, made it more obvious this was supposed to be a parody. And, yes, DreamWorks is big on the satirizing of established literary  conventions and characters, like with Shrek poking fun at familiar fairy tale tropes, etc. Hence Megamind’s “borrowing” of the Superman origin myth, no doubt, and even the whole Unbreakable dealie-o with the story being driven from the villain’s point of view. But whereas with Shrek the satire was immediately apparent, Metro Man’s appropriation of not only Tony Stark’s charming-yet-ironic personality but his freakin theme music!? just comes across like a poorly-made knock-off.

Even Dimension Films’ genre spoof, Superhero Movie, suddenly seems less derivative:

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What do you think? Megamind’s Metro Man: nuanced spoof or not-so-subtle imitation?

In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, a relatively new medium called the comic book unleashed a new kind of character into the consciousness of American youth. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, this character possessed superhuman powers and a dedication to using those powers for the benefit of humanity. Often battling and defeating evil as hyperbolic as his own goodness, his iconic name would become the source of the term for this all-American archetype, the “superhero.” In the decades since Superman‘s arrival, innumerable variations on this theme have emerged, but always these characters have struggled under the weight of a concept about who they must be that was invented before television. For the past 70 years we have been living with a 20th century version of the superhero. Until now. Though the Iron Man character was originally created in the early 60s, his most recent incarnation, as played by Robert Downey Jr., and directed by Jon Favreau in the just released Iron Man 2, is really the first Millennial superhero.

The original Superman prototype possessed a key characteristic, one that his creators, first generation American sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, would have known something about, one that this “Man of Tomorrow” would pass on as part of his legacy to future generations of masked heroes: a secret identity. This trait would become an intractable part of the very definition of a superhero, as much a prerequisite for his mythology as extraordinary powers, or at least a flamboyant getup. And yet, in a press conference at the end of 2008′s first installment of the Iron Man franchise, Tony Stark announces to the world that he is Iron Man. This is where the sequel starts off. The need for a secret identity is gone. The entire world knows — and not because some tabloid uncovered the mystery man behind the mask, but because he just straight up told everyone. In the comic books, it took Stark 40 years to make this move. For Superman or Spiderman or Batman or virtually any other superhero from the prior century (save some like the X-Men) their secret identities were their most sacred possessions, the keys to their undoings, and they fought as hard to protect them as to save humanity itself. But in the 21st century, Tony Stark’s approach to privacy reflects how Millennials now think of the concept.

These days, the kind of stuff kids choose to reveal about themselves online is almost beyond comprehension. The latest social platform eroding the boundary between what was once strictly private and is now exposed to the world is Formspring.me, which the New York Times calls, “the online version of the bathroom wall in school“:

While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.

Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly — leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits.

Social media researcher danah boyd asked a similar question a couple of weeks ago:

This [behavior] has become so pervasive on Formspring so as to define what participation there means.  More startlingly, teens are answering self-humiliating questions and posting their answers to a publicly visible page that is commonly associated with their real name. Why? What’s going on?

While this particular trend is definitely a bit baffling, those of us that have grown up in the digital age have pretty much come to expect that the privacy arc of the internet is perpetually bending more and more towards greater disclosure. Privacy, as Facebook’s Millennial founder Mark Zuckerberg insists, is dead:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time… But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting [Facebook] now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Here’s an interesting visualization of the Evolution of Privacy on Facebook, indicating how the website has let ever more of our information become increasingly public over the years:

Oh… wait a second, no, that last one is actually the arc reactor implant that’s keeping Tony Stark alive. But, no doubt, Skynet… err.. Facebook is intent on catching up to the full-pie version of the chart soon.

Anyway, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Peter Parker, they were never prepared for this brave new networked world. Their entire way of being simply doesn’t fit anymore. Neither with Facebook and its social network platform ilk, nor the (*cough* relative) sensibilities of the Millennial youth who use it. For Tony Stark, transparency isn’t just relegated to the subject of his super-powered “alter ego,” it’s a pervasive part of his total personality, his way of being in the world. Stark is as blatant as his id, his mobile touch-screen device is actually, literally, transparent, allowing others to see everything he’s doing on it, every surface in his house seems to be equipped with touch-screen capabilities, his browsing activities public to anyone sitting nearby who cares to look. Zuckerberg himself likely couldn’t have dreamed up a more post-Privacy kind of superhero, one less conflicted about the disparate parts of his identity. With the death of privacy, you cannot be one thing in one context, and something different in another. You cannot be Clark Kent at the Daily Planet desk job, and then Superman on the night shift. You are exactly who you are to everyone at all times. Like no other superhero, Tony Stark’s identity isn’t conflicted. It’s absolute.

In her book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, psychology professor Jean Twenge writes:

It has always been normal for kids to have big dreams, but the dreams of kids today are bigger than ever. By the time kids figure out they’re not going to be celebrities or sports figures, they’re well into adolescence, or even their twenties.

High expectations can be the stuff of inspiration, but more often they set GenMe up for bitter disappointment. [The book] Quarterlife Crisis concludes that twenty-somethings often take a while to realize that the “be whatever you want to be, do whatever you want to do,” mantra of their childhoods is not attainable.

In the late 90′s, Tyler Durden, himself a sort of Gen X superhero — a transitional alpha version precursor to the Gen Y launch model, if you will — said it like:

We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Even in the throes of the economic crisis, my generation hasn’t really had a Great Depression either — though we did come this close. And even after 9/11 my generation hasn’t had a Great War. The world is now far too mind-numbingly complicated and complex to even have a clear concept of a single, monolithic Evil to fight. The “heroes” of my generation, the ideals that kids look up to and wish to be like, haven’t been men of steel battling evil for a long time, they are now, like Durden says, millionaires and rock stars. And that is precisely what 21st Century Tony Stark is. After he comes out of the closet (or, more accurately, the basement science lab) as Iron Man, he becomes a worldwide celebrity, a household name. Even the migrant worker he stops to buy strawberries from on the Pacific Coast Highway asks, “Are you Iron Man?” like he’s recognized a movie star.

And unlike Superman or SpiderMan or Batman or any other major superhero before him whose truth the world was not yet ready to handle, Tony Stark answers casually, “Sometimes.”

Perhaps that’s the other side of what allows a 21st century superhero to be transparent. The modern world can accept him as such. Gen Y is a lot more tolerant of lifestyle differences than prior generations, after all. The X-Men didn’t hide that they were different, either, but then again, they COULDN’T hide it — looking like Beast or Nightcrawler, or having Rogue or Cycolps’ particular mutations, you couldn’t just “pass” in normal society — and the humans the X-Men fought to protect could never accept them for being what they are. Not so in the world of Tony Stark. He’s no mutant. No outcast. He’s the most popular kid in school. The late DJ AM even spins at his birthday bash. The 21st century Tony Stark reveals to the world he is Iron Man, and the 21st century world says…. Awesome!

In the past, being a tech entrepreneur-slash-engineer, as Tony Stark is, would have made him a nerd, or otherwise Bruce Wayne, still stuck in the previous millennium, putting on a show of  irresponsible playboy-ness to deflect attention from both his morbidly serious crime-fighting alter ego and his humorless tech geek underbelly. Like, remember when no one would have wanted to sit at the lunch table with kids who talked about stuff like “augmented reality”?

Yeah, not so much, anymore. In the  21st century, being a tech geek no longer detracts from the image of a bad-ass or a dilettante. James Bond and Q have combined into one seamless character. It’s 2010, and geeks are cool! Hell, we’ve even got one as President.

While both Wayne and Stark are surrounded by high tech everything, for the 20th century hero all the gadgetry is just a means to an end. Even the Batmobile is ultimately just a flashy tool. Same could technically be said about the iPhone, but who would? In the post-iPod era we have a very different relationship with our technology. Our favorite tech objects aren’t just for utilitarian application, they’re obsessed over, fetishized, loved. It’s why Gizmodo would pay $10,000 for an exclusive scoop on an in-production, “lost” 4g iPhone, and why an enormous global audience would give a crap. When Stark says in the movie that the Iron Man suit is a part of him, that he and it are one, we all intimately understand exactly what he means even if the rest of us don’t actually literally plug our gadgets into our chest cavities.

After a raucous birthday party in which we see Stark, in full Iron Man gear, getting shitfaced and acting the fool, (he’s dying at the time, and feeling a bit of the nothing-really-matters mortality blues — being dissolute and apathetic, itself, unusually postmodern behavior for a superhero), S.H.I.E.L.D. agency director Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) “grounds” the hungover superhero by sequestering him in his house with all access to communication with the outside world cut off until he solves a theoretical physics problem. This superhero’s punishment is having his phone and internet privileges revoked and being sent up to his room to finish his math homework. There isn’t a single one of the 60 million American Millennials that doesn’t relate to this.

When Favreau was looking for a 21st century industrialist corporate executive to use as a model for his and Robert Downey Jr’s interpretation of Tony Stark, he sought out Elon Musk, co-founder of paypal. Musk even has a cameo in the movie, chatting Tony up about an electric rocket, a concept referencing Musk’s current endeavors, Tesla Motors, which produces fully electric sports cars that rival Porsche in performance, and SpaceX, a private aerospace company working to invent the first reusable rockets, which would dramatically reduce costs and eventually lead to affordable space-travel. This dude is the inspiration for the 21st century version of Stark.

So what’s Tony Stak’s inspiration? Why does he do what he does? There was no childhood trauma that drove him to caped crusading. He wasn’t raised by adoptive Earth parents who imbued him with a strong moral compass during his formative years on a farm in the American Heartland. Sure, ok, he underwent a certain crisis of conscience in his 40s after escaping from a terrorist hostage situation in Afghanistan, shutting down the weapons manufacturing division of Stark Industries and all, but still, why does he take it so much further, going so far as to “privatize world peace.” …. For the thrill of it! As he himself says, he keeps up the good fight at his own pleasure, adding, “and I like to pleasure myself often.” Unlike the prior century’s superhero, this new version saves the world not out of any overwhelming sense of obligation or indentured servitude to duty, but because he can do what he wants, when he wants, because he wants to, and most importantly, he GETS what he wants. Sure he has to work for it, but unlike with, say, Peter Parker and Mary Jane or Clark Kent and Lois Lane or even Buffy and Angel, what he wants isn’t perpetually out of his grasp just because he is who he is. Being Iron Man isn’t a burden, it’s an epic thrill-ride.

The first 21st century superhero is a hedonistic, narcissistic, even nihilistic, adrenaline junkie, billionaire entrepreneur do-gooder. If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that “with great power comes great responsibility,” Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun.

You can’t get any more Gen Y than that.

Welcome, 21st Century superhero, my generation has been waiting for you.

In the course of just 30 seconds the ad takes you on a ride of intrigue and suspense that manages to tell a whole epic saga (literally) in a highly entertaining, insightfully modern way. No wonder the campaign is called “Search Stories.” It’s like “Hamlet: (Facebook News Feed Edition)” meets The Usual Suspects. And just as you’ve put the pieces together, and it’s dawning on you who the Kaiser Soze behind these searches is, it’s over.

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Makes you want to watch it a second time.

Search Stories is such a smart response to the Microsoft’s “It’s time to Bing and decide” campaign earlier this year for their new search engine. Because the truth about how we search for things online, is the truth about how we think about and live our lives — as exemplified here by Bruce Wayne’s. Life is an ongoing story we create. It’s not simply a string of isolated queries and decisions, it’s a series of searches and discoveries.

Sean Bateman

Student at Bennington College

Albany, New York Area

Education

• Bennington College

Connections

2 connections

Industry

Music

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Sean Bateman’s Summary

I’m a Senior at Bennington College, though we mostly refer to it as Camden and pretend that it’s in New Hampshire. I live at Booth house, with a Frog roommate and a House Pigs house band. Sheer sensations.

My brother demanded I sign-up to “explore business opportunities”, but I’m not into that. I have ulterior motives, and her name is Lauren Hynde. I’m in the Computing Center, where Lauren once hung out, but she’s left, gone, history, vapor. The only problem is I still dream about her, and she’s all blue. It always ends up this way. No Big Surprise.

Every time I looked at at her I was struck by great-looking she is. And standing close to her, even if it was only for something like a millisecond, I overloaded on how great-looking that girl is. She looked at me in what seemed like slow motion. I could rarely meet her blue-eyed gaze back. She’s a little too gorgeous. Her perfect, full lips locked in on that sexy uncaring smile. She’s constructed perfectly. She used to smile when she noticed me staring and I smiled back. I’m still thinking, I want to know this girl. Being around her was sort of.. I don’t know what sort of is.

I’ll take all this down if she wants. I’ll deal with it. Show must go on. Rock’n'Roll.

Sean Bateman’s Specialties:

I plug in my Fender and play girls songs I’ve written myself and then segue into “You’re Too Good to Be True” and I play it quietly and sing the lyrics slowly and softly and they’re often so moved that they start to cry and

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Sean Bateman’s Education

• Bennington College

  Music, Rock’n'Roll, 2004 — 2008

  Majoring in Rock’n'Roll (before I was a Lit major, before I became a Ceramics major, before I become a Social Science major). I may switch to Computers. Whatever.

  There some things that I will never do: I will never buy cheese popcorn in The Pub. I will never tell a video game to &@#$ off. I will never erase graffiti about myself that I happen to catch in bathrooms around campus. I will never play “Burning Down the House” on a jukebox. I will never be one of the last people hanging out at a Camden party. Those people remind me of kids being picked last for teams in high school. It’s weak. Really improves one’s sense of self-worth.

  Activities and Societies:

  Hanging out (The Carousel, Commons, The Pub, The Brasserie, Burger King, Dining Hall, Ann Arbour is where it’s at).

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Additional Information

Sean Bateman’s Interests:

Coffee without cream (to feed my impending ulcer), girls (classy yet sexy), smoking, riding my motorcycle into town, watching people argue about Nazis, Planet of the Apes (I recently signed into Netflix), watching TV in the commons, playing my Fender for girls, music (Velvet Underground, Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Iron Butterfly, Zep, The Animals)

Sean Bateman’s Groups:

Sometimes I check out the AA meetings in Bingham

Netflix is absolutely an anachronism to 1987, when the book was published and one of the most important activities of the day was returning videotapes, plus the Sean Bateman of Ellis’s book was definitely not in college between 2004-2008, as this Sean Bateman appears to be. But who cares? The overall character tone, and many major and minor details are completely true to the original–not to mention hilarious in the context of LinkedIn–and even to the story behind the book. The college the characters in The Rules Of Attraction attend, Camden, is, in fact, based on Bennington (which is Ellis’s Alma Mater), and Sean is totally into Lauren Hynde. I’m even positive there’s a chapter in the book that Ellis straight up just ends on the word “and” like “Sean Bateman’s Specialties” section does above, so this Sean Bateman, who supposedly graduated Camden this year, nevertheless still even comes across like Ellis’s Sean Bateman who graduated 20 years ago, and if you dig a character, isn’t that all that really matters?

As soon as I got over how amusing it was that Sean Bateman had a LinkedIn profile I remembered that the character in Ellis’s American Psycho is Patrick Bateman, Sean’s older brother, and since Sean mentions his brother demanded he join LinkedIn, it came as no surprise, that–check this out!–Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho is on LinkedIn. His profile actually is a lot more serious, and not as funny as Sean’s, so I won’t bother re-posting it, but if you happen to be a huge American Psycho nut, go over there and knock yourself out. He’s interested in “getting back in touch” evidently.

Social media as a platform for “characters” is as ancient as Friendster (man, whoever was responsible for the unbearably hilarious “San Francisco” profile back in like 2002, you were a complete riot!) and with the arrival of Lonelygirl15 and cewebrities like Jeffree Star, web 2.0, is veritably rife with “characters,” fictional and stranger-than-fictional. And, of course, there is the widespread social media “fan-fiction” of sorts, where people create unofficial profiles for characters they love, like the aforementioned LinkedIn profiles. But I’m thinking about something different from all this. I’m thinking of characters from character-driven stories on traditional media (books, movies, TV) living on in social media. I mean, really living there. Inhabiting the social media space with the same seamless familiarity that characters from novels cross over to the big screen. Communicating with us in their own voices, and with their own personalities that we have come to know and love, but in a new medium.

Michael Patrick King, director of the Sex and the City TV show and movie, would often talk about how great it was that they could really make the show authentically of New York because they could shoot scenes in actual existing restaurants and venues around the city (yes, I did watch the director’s commentary on a bunch of episodes, so?) The result was, indeed, a world that felt unmistakably New York, and establishments that no doubt were only too happy to reap the benefits of publicity in exchange. As an example of what’s possible with creating a living profile for a fictional character, an official Carrie Bradshaw profile, one written in her voice, that would generate content which would comply with the show’s bible and story arcs, could, for instance, feature a blog post mentioning a new restaurant she’d been to as a supplement to the show’s narrative. Suddenly the profile becomes not just promotion for the show, but, in fact, it’s own kind of channel. Creates the opportunity to start thinking about stories and character development in a completely new, almost infinite dimension that, of all the prior formats, perhaps only comic books came anywhere close too before, but this medium comes with something absolutely unbeatable: the opportunity to interact with these characters as well! If we are down to be friends with bands we love on Myspace, I’d bet we’d be into keeping up with characters we love too. Say, Bruce Wayne on Twitter? Or… Zoolander on Facebook? James Bond on BrightKite? Juno on Xanga?

Not that I’ve looked too far into this, I mean, maybe there are already plenty of major fictional characters out there living their daily lives on social networking sites, (I won’t be surprised if they’re Hannah Montana or iCarly or something) but I’m now totally fascinated by this whole idea. If anyone does know of examples of this actually being implemented: Fictional characters from stories in traditional media being (officially) brought to life with their true voice and personality, living and digitally breathing alongside us on social media, let me know.

Oh, and I’m back from my travels.

Hi.

UPDATE: Just discovered (thanks, David) that Mcsweeny’s is apparently totally on top of this idea, with their adaptation of HAMLET: FACEBOOK NEWS FEED EDITION:

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet’s play: “What is wrong with you?”

Hilarious.

[Obscura] create[s] visual spaces and displays so groundbreaking that other design studios not only can’t emulate them, they never would have conjured them in the first place. The largest projection dome on the planet, equipped with a real-time video stream? A 10-story, 60,000-lumen projection of a Michael Graves painting? If you can dream it up on an acid trip, Obscura can reproduce it — on a seismic scale. The company’s engineers have devised software programs that seamlessly combine images from multiple hi-def projectors, making mathematical corrections to account for irregular screening surfaces (a complex image given a fish-eye tweak, for instance, will look appropriately flat when projected onto a curved wall). The proprietary algorithms that drive these programs allow the team to display virtually any image on any surface — a brick building, a jumbo jet, or the hood and windshield of a new Saturn hybrid — with no distortion. “We’re into the immersive experience. It’s a holodeck kind of thing,” Connolly says, referring to the computer-simulated architecture first imagined in Star Trek. “I can turn this room into the south of France. I can turn this pillar into a waterfall.”

….As Obscura grew, Threlkel played the Pied Piper, convincing a motley crew of builders from Oregon to move to the Bay Area and construct über-domes, jumbo touch displays, and other fantastical video-projection treatments. “In 2000, I was running my family business in Oregon, Pacific Domes,” says Chris Lejeune, Obscura’s head of production. “Travis’s first project with Obscura involved surround projection, so he called me up and we hit it off. I was intending to move to San Francisco anyway, so the timing was perfect.” Lejeune and his building crew, who call themselves G-Bohs (for gypsy bohemians), feature dreadlocks, multiple piercings, and a postapocalyptic style. But their guiding ethos is straightforward: Failure is impossible.

In part, the G-Boh work ethic is based on a code of having one another’s back. “We’ve been working together longer than Obscura’s been around,” Matty Dowlen says. “We’re a family.” But it’s also a testament to the genuine respect they have for Threlkel and Connolly’s vision. Says Dowlen: “There’s a sense that we’re building something unique and beautiful. Yeah, we do work for corporations, but we’re giving them a piece of what we love.”

“In the past, it was either products or services, black or white, but there may be this evolving hybrid where we can do both,” Connolly says. “Right now, it’s like we’re a Labrador retriever in a room full of tennis balls, and we can’t stop picking them up.”

And what, really, is so wrong with going after every ball? The Obscura crew is reveling in the moment. “We’re so booked right now it’s crazy,” Connolly says. “Last week, I went from Detroit to Dubai, then to Minneapolis. I was in, like, five different time zones. I just heard from a guy who owns one of the world’s largest megayachts — he wants us to go out there and do a multimedia retrofit of the entire vessel” — complete with touch whiteboards that will serve as a digital concierge to manage everything from GPS to weather mapping, not to mention popcorn delivery to an onboard theater (total price: $10 million). “How frickin’ James Bond ’80s is that, man?!” At moments like these, it’s clear that Obscura’s 10-year plan — or lack thereof — is utterly beside the point.

Whole Story HERE>>

Best part about the piece was how refreshing it is to see the culture take a backseat to the actual creative work. I’ve seen so much stuff written about organizations that involve this culture paint its output not as the results of intensely talented individuals and creative teams, but as if it were some kind of bizarre or untouchable or, worst of all, elitist statement. The reality of excited, dedicated, innovative creators, just doing what they do, without the imposition of some cultural divide, is a welcome departure.

Though I gotta admit, “Failure Is Impossible” totally sounds like a fantastic superhero tagline.