Study: After sex, so many tweet dreams

I'm sorry to be mentioning sex again. But I have some survey findings that might just interrupt your own cogitations about the meaning and function of life.

The fine and upstanding folks at Retrevo.com, which, I believe, is a site where you can buy various sorts of electronica with which to record your most public and private moments, decided to survey today's under-35s.

And what appalling people they seem to be.

Indeed, Retrevo's findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one's own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the "leading thinkers in the radical tech community" who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: "The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will."

I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: "I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make sex suck and staring at paint drying the greatest thing ever."

Over capacity? And why might that be?

(Credit: CC Playerx/Flickr)

But where would we be without the current version of sex? No governors of South Carolina dancing the Argentine tango. No jokes about presidents and cigars. And not anyone telling us that, indeed, we are the best.

What a dull thing the future might turn out to be.

Which brings us back to the current state of concupiscence and Retrevo's discovery that 36 percent of people leap on to Twitter or Facebook immediately after conjugal behavior.

Not just once or twice, but "often." What can they possibly be tweeting? What words and phrases can their Facebook updates possibly enjoy? "Jeffrey H. has just got some"? "Melissa J. is in flagrante"?

Or perhaps something as very basic as "Tracy T. is single"?

My gob is quite simply smacked at the idea that people must trumpet their intimate behavior within seconds of its climax. I do, however, have more interesting information.

Apparently, men are twice as likely to broadcast to their social network immediately post-flagrante than are women. This despite women allegedly being the majority on most social networks.

And if you are one of those who believes that iPhone users are deeply narcissistic nabobs, then please consider this most disturbing piece of news: iPhone users are three times more likely to tweet or Facebook post-coitally than are BlackBerry users.

I find myself so completely shaken by this data that I feel an inordinate need to lie down for a period of some months.

Has this social-networking nonsense so completely gripped our very beings that we are nothing other than newscasters of our own ridiculous subjectivity?

My girlfriend says she'll let me know what she thinks about this, but first she's got a few tweets to send.

[ZBeeb]

So it seems to me that if the site is best described as "a site where you can buy various sorts of electronica with which to record your most public and private moments", that if they conducted the survey their data would be skewed by the nature of their client base...

ie we're not talking about 36% of the real word... but 36% of people who are signed on to a site where you record such things to start with - they by definition are more likely to be... dare I say it...

Given the source, the results are less surprising than they would be had it been a site more representative of the real world - it would be like Microsoft saying Zune has 85% market share because 85% of the traffic on the Zune store comes from Zunes.

[Monty Brench]

To ZBeeb,you custard.

[karpenterskids]

+1.

No, make that +2.

[Dalkorian]

So is it coincidence that you're posting an article about people tweeting after sex and included the image of the twitter fail whale? This in the country where Viagra isn't just successful, but has inspired competition that has also been successful!
;-)

[ChrisMatyszczyk]

@Dalkorian,

A complete coincidence, of course, This would never, never, never have entered my head.

But thank you for pointing out the rather poetic subtext:)

Chris

[UnlabledMilk]

Chris wins.

[MrBoomshadow]

We're talking about a service where people blog about their dietary habits. Since sex is rarer for most people than food, of course it will seem relatively blogworthy if they also blogged about the scrambled eggs they had for breakfast.

And, of course, if they manage both at the same time, that's a massive coup...particularly if they weren't at home at the time!

[cvaldes1831]

This assumes that no one lies about how much sex they are having.

[Michael_Anissimov]

Here my reaction, try not to take it too personally:

http://tinyurl.com/yjh8fyr

[alkalinex1987]

wow, this could've been the most boring read of my entire life.. second to that of watching an ape throw feces at a zoo park attendee... or watching replays of Bob Sagat doing voice overs of home movies using some god-aweful ventriloquism. Tasteless... Maybe you're putting your junk under the microscope and thinking, WOW, it's so big, a bit much? how about take a break from the pornography, give your **** some rest from rosy palm and her four friends, and go meet some women... hows that for social networking.. life != electronic... life = electric. [/endscape]