Akkam’s Razor

There was a segment on NPR's On the Media (I think) recently about how porn is being left-behind in the great social networking gold rush.  This is quite surprising, given the internet's indebtedness to pornography.  Without the demand (& market) for pornography, the internet as we know it would never have come into existence. In the beginning the internet was a dark & silent place.

In the beginning, all the content that existed was text based - fan fiction, MUDDs, stories, and the like. Eventually, the web came to be - and what followed was a world of color, sight, & sound. And what drove that market? Peoples desire to watch and listen to porn created the market necessary for innovation.

The net was almost entirely devoid of females, yet stocked with males who's usernames & servers often followed naming conventions reminiscent of Dungeons & Dragons, Greek Mythology, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (think back to your college email address and the naming conventions used for servers). Those "geeks", like the ones in your IT department who snoop through your email, were & are the ones who helped form the online culture that we currently have.

One of the biggest changes likely to affect porn has been the increase of skills of the non-professional, the increase in the capability of those tools, the continuous dropping of the cost of storage (hard drives), & the general drop in the cost of hardware. Content creation is now within the realm of everyone.  As we've seen, the competition for User-Generated Content (UGC) is beginning to encroach on the consumption of television and music.  Indeed, we are beginning to see the establishment adult entertainment industry employ protectionistic tactics reminiscent of the RIAA and MPAA. 

The shock factor of nudity from the near-torrent of B and C-List celebrity sex tapes has lessened the taboo factor, and possibly inspired some amateurs to DIY.  In that same general time frame, the internet's users began to accept it's voyeuristic & exhibitionistic styles of storytelling. Two stories that are worth telling are those of "Libby Hoeller" & Jennifer Ringley, from the perspective of the personal & the public.

Jennifer Ringley (wiki) decided, for reasons of which I'm not entirely sure, to share her own life, in its entirety, online. During the late 1990s, the go-to site was Jennicam. She decided to make her private life very public - although it did eventually come to an end.

"Libby Hoeller" (not her real name, I think) had shared some private webcam video, with a boyfriend she subsequently broke up with. He responded by sharing it with the entire internet. Much to her dismay, she is an internet celebrity. Unintentionally, her private life became quite public.

Most recently, you can see the non-outrage of the cell phone photo of High School Musical darling Vanessa Hudgens, or the lack of interest in the various "Superbowl moments" of Ms. Lohan, Spears, and Hilton.

Pew Internet Research found in a survey of [the] Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users (PDF) that 73 percent of U.S. adults own a cell phone, 68 percent have a desktop computer, 30 percent possess a laptop, 73 percent connect to the Internet, 37 percent regularly use instant messaging, 41 percent have sent a text message from a cell phone, and 19 percent have shared photos, stories, artwork or videos.  That's the potential for (the creation, consumption, and distribution, if not monetization of) a lot of porn.

Our ham fisted government, in moves reminiscent of the wildly successful war on alcohol and drugs, is trying to legislate professional pornographers out of business. Two sterling examples are the DCDA and USC 2257.  Compound that by the re-tasking of the FBI away from terror & law breakers towards legal pornography, & you can see a definite "chilling effect" on professional porn.

So here we are at a convergence of technologies. There are now infinite ways to produce and view porn, both professional & amateur (Consumerotica?) - webcams, podcasts, camera phones, & digital cameras - creating erotic material that can be consumed on the printed page, PDAs, portable gaming system, laptops, HD LCDS, or cell phones. The ability to get it anywhere will certainly present some problems.  But as people have been getting control of the technologies for content creation, and making their own erotica, they are also gaining control over their own sexuality.

There's plenty of people subverting mainstream sites for their fetishes, such as Flickr, and there are red-light ripoffs of brands like MySpace, Match.com, and YouTube (among others). 

So what might the future look like?

We're certain to hear of more cases like the one about the guy charged with public indecency because he was watching porn on his car's DVD player, except the new stories will involve laptops, cell phones, & video iPods. The world of internet porn largely caters to a male clientèle - although just recently, the makeup of net users has changed - there are now more women online than men - will traditional porn, increasingly viewed as degrading towards women disappear? Will it change? Or will women's erotica surge to prominence? An most importantly, what will the outcome of this significant switch in the paradigm of content creator and content consumer?

What happens next?

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