The effect of Pornography on Technology Trends

[Y3MBailey]

Hey everyone I am currently a student finishing off my final year doing a design degree and part of my degree I wrote and essay on the effect of pornography on technology trends. I was helped by Sandie Caine who did a great job in assisting me.

I received an A for it and thought that some of you may like to read it and let me know what you think. It's quite an easy read as far as dissertation essays go. Obviously usual copyright rules apply but as it's a piece of academic work it's reference-able so if anyone wishes to cite it then reference Matthew Bailey & Brunel University 2008.

Contextual essay
Technosexual - The Significance of Pornography in Modern Technology

It?s the early 80s and you find yourself wandering around a local video rental shop, your proud new VHS machine sitting at home.. Your feeling a little uncomfortable to be here. An old man scuttles passed you not making eye contact or even acknowledging your existence. But what are you going to watch on this brand new box of imagination...? porn of course.

Videotape first emerged as a cheap and efficient alternative to film for television production. Its
development for home use owes itself to Sony with their Betamax format but its maturity as a worldwide standard to porn. Predicting that the greatest use of home VCRs would be time-shifting, (the recording of TV shows on the air for later viewing), Sony designed Betamax tape with a one hour playing time. When the market for videotape proved not to be time shifting, but pre-recorded movies instead, longer-playing tape was demanded, and VHS arose to meet the
demand. Yet another example of a Sony format related ?cock-up?, but that?s another story altogether. Though Betamax eventually went to a four hour format, it was too late. Within just a few years, two, four, and six-hour VHS tape became the industry standard (Wasko 1994:121).

What were people watching on these video tapes?... Casablanca?... no it was porn. Early Video rental shops (The places that drove Betamax from the market) were almost exclusively pornographic, survived and drawing on the same customers as the early nickelodeons (Lardner 1987:184). This trend was the same in home video sales. It was not until the mid-1980s that first,
local video-rental stores, and next, national chains like Blockbuster & Ritz Video entered the field with videos for the mass market. By then, porn had well and truly shown the way. Thus, the victory of VHS over Betamax, and the triumph of rental and purchasing over time-shifting had been a decider. According to a 1986 Merrill Lynch study, pornographic tapes constituted over half the sales of pre-recorded tapes in the late 70s (Lynch 1986). For the first time in history (but definitely not the last) pornography had led the way. John Heidenry, a historian of the sexual revolution stated that the VCR was the most significant step in the adult-film industry, and along with Deep Throat, the catalyst for a hard-core porn revolution.

Consumers of pornography accelerate the uptake of new media technologies by becoming early buyers and users, thereby providing a profitable market for newly introduced services (Cooperman 1999). Their payment of an initial high premium increases early sales, thus reducing the cost for later adopters who benefit from larger economies of scale. As more mainstream products become affordable and profitable, the relative percentage share of pornography reduces though the absolute volume and revenue continue to grow.

But the format wars of the 80s are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to technology that has been groomed in it?s early years by pornography.

Families who chat to loved ones over hundreds of miles via computer owe this pleasure to the porn industry. The politicians and ?myspace discovered? singers such as Kate Nash (Nash 2008), who post their videos on Video sites, also need to thank the porn industry. Plus in the very near future, when you download a full-length feature film quickly, you will be thankful to the people who made their money developing technologies to distribute XXX content. The industry even affects how large giants like Yahoo and Microsoft MSN do business. Both rely on fee-based subscriptions and prominently feature video-streaming technology. Even Amazon has used affiliate based advertising on its sites, posting free content on 900,000 smaller sites, to attract millions of consumers to its site. Pop-up ads are popping up everywhere on the net. All of these common place internet phenomena were used first on sex sites (Swartz 2007). Playboy became one of the first customers of digital watermarking to prevent and announce unauthorized use of its material on the Web (Economist 1997:64). Porn was using premium rate phone numbers long before the ITV scandal. Everywhere people are looking to what the adult industry can do for them.

Nick White is a man who wants more sex for him and everyone in his office and unlike most executives is very happy to shout it from the roof top. He is the head of the adult service division of Virgin Mobile and he knows that sex sells, very well (Virgin 2002). In the early years of the twenty-first century mobile phone companies spent billions of pounds on networks to allow us to download images and video to ?third generation phones?. ?Suddenly, everyone in the mobile communications industry wants to know what the sex trade - or ?adult entertainment? as they call it - can do for them,? says Ben Wood, of Surrey based IT firm Gartner. Dario Betti, an analyst at digital media consultancy Ovum says, ?Like it or not, pornography drives each new convenient visual technology, and 3G which combined powerful new media applications will be no different.? As it turns out it wasn?t (Arlidge 2002).

The porn executives also came up with the whole concept of user generated content. These ?girlfriend sites? in the 90s had the idea that men could video their wives or girlfriends and put the videos online for all to see. But everyone had different cameras and different software so they went about finding a way all the videos could be algorithmically encoded into the same format, and watched on anyones computer. "With a lot of trial and error, the adult industry got the videos to work. Now all of a sudden you have YouTube. The adult industry was doing that for 10 years," said Larry Walters (an attorney who works with First Amendment issues involving pornography in Orlando, Florida) (Belser 2008).

An Adult Industry conference being held in Miami in January 2008 searched to discover new ways to drive porn and technology. A new boom of free online porn sites such as Redtube and Youporn (which has seen a 14177% increase in visitors in the last year according to web traffic analysts Compete(2008)) has cut into profits that have so far come mainly from DVDs, videotapes and pay-per-view or subscription-based Web sites. ?To survive, adult entertainers need to be on top of phone trends? said Jay Grdina, the president of ClubJenna Inc (an adult entertainment provider) which he co-founded with his wife, world-famous porn star Jenna Jameson. "If you don't evolve you're going to die. ... We need to make sure we're ready," Grdina said in an interview before his keynote speech at the Mobile Adult Content Congress in January 2008 (Carew 2008).

So what are these brand new technologies from which Grdina speaks? The most exciting development to come according to Larry Walters, may be the purchase of Videoz, a site that sells full-length pornographic movies that download quickly to a mainstream movie distribution company. Mr. Walters said one of the companies he work for (which cannot be revealed for legal reasons) wants to buy VideoZ to gain access to the programming needed to download the movies (Belser 2008). This is what we?ll be seeing from mainstream movie companies many years down the line. Other such technological achievements include Fyrebox. Estefano Isaias debuted Fyrebox at the 2008 Adult Expo in Las Vegas this January, which he is showing as the first set-top box to deliver DVD-quality adult movies on demand to home televisions. The Fyrebox simply has to be plugged into an Ethernet port in a broadband connection. Another plug goes into the TV, and thats about al there is to it. To look at the scope here its nearest mainstream rival offering a more family friendly service is offering about 5,000 downloadable movies, Fyrebox offers over 20,000 and that number is growing everyday (CNN 2008).

This is not a new occurrence. Sometimes the success of a particular technology is so that people can explore their own sexual awakening (Anon). In 1948 Edwin Land introduced the first Polaroid Camera. It was on this day that boyfriends and husbands all around the world decide that they needed a naked photo of their girlfriend or wife. Finally this could happen without the idea of a man in a dark room looking at nudie pictures of their lover. In 1963, he invented instant colour photographs to better help the industry he had unwillingly launched. In more recent times the Polaroid has all but vanished and has been replaced by the convenience of digital cameras. No longer do you have to wait a minute to take a photograph it is instant (Waving the exposed polaroid in the air while waiting for it to develop does absolutely nothing and only serves to make you look like an idiot). Now we can take hundreds of instant dirty photos and fix the lighting afterwards. Suddenly everyone has the ability to be a pornographer.

Following on from this, lets not forget about the advent of the camcorder and the whole world of possibilities they brought to the table. This new era of do-it-yourself pornography meant that owners of camcorders could, and did, produce their own movies. This marked the rise of the self made videotapes and a new wave of amateur products. The tendency with technology has been to move work from people into machines, now all manner of people with little or no skill could become a producer. Now the real question here is, whether the camcorder manufactures knew of this unadvertised application. I?m sure all they expected people to do was record weddings, christenings and bar-mitzvahs in the same way bong pipes are sold for ?medicinal purposes only?. In 1978, Forbes writer James Cook stated that the camcorder manufacturers ?Like to think that camcorders will be used to enable people to watch more sports and cultural events. They are only kidding themselves It is an open secret that the biggest market is visual sex. (Cook 1978:82)?

With this element of interactive porn has come further pushes in technology, and with it comes certain moral dilemmas. Once purely in telephone boxes around the capital and in the back of the Daily Sport a simple search online leads to websites such as AdultWork and Punternet. The former offering a meeting service for escorts, ?cyber-sexers?, and all sorts of sexual services for sale, the latter offering reviews for escorts and ?adult parties? all around the country. Now porn can literally come out of the screen and touch you. Recently in the news has been Big Sister a Prague based brothel offering punters free sex in exchange for the encounter with the prostitute being broadcast over the internet live and being sold as dvds. Could we be seeing this technology and way of thinking in mainstream walk of life? Could this be the next step up from reality TV? Maybe a show set inside a dentist?s surgery where the patients got treated for free providing it got shown on TV. Immoral?... maybe... would people watch it?... yes. This is blurring the line on who is the performer and who is the consumer that is leading the way in interactive entertainment.

What about ?HIGH DEF?? I hear you cry. Yes the most relevant and current of technology trends has been mysteriously absent so far, thats because its a complicated one that does not perfectly fit the mould. As we have established by now porn is always at the forefront of new media technology. With reference to the new format wars, the first HD DVD released in the UK was Digital Playground's big budget porn movie 'Island Fever 3'. Paul O?Donovan, an analyst at Gartner Inc, said ?pornography?s support of either HD format will be a strong factor to the uptake of the technology by the general marketplace, but even more critical is Sony?s adoption of the technology.? O?Donovan said even though the Blu-ray format will be more expensive initially and will come after that of HD-DVD, the sheer support it is receiving from the entertainment industry, including pornography studios, will catapult it to a victory within a range of three to five years (Mearian 2006). This hasn?t strictly happened and the new high definition format wars is not being effected by porn this time in quite the same way. One of the main reasons is due to the poor sales of high definition products. Walk into any local HMV and you will find a plethora of 3 for 2 deals across all releases. The problem is in this increasingly virtual world high definition will always be a technophile format and a stepping stone to high definition content online for the masses. But pornographic movie studios are still trying to stay on top of the trend by releasing high-definition DVDs. They have however also discovered that the high definition format is not quite as sexy as once first thought. The high-definition format is bring to light imperfections in the actors, from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.

Producers are taking steps to hide this. Some shots are lit differently, while some actors simply are not shot at certain angles, or are getting cosmetic surgery, or seeking expert grooming. ?The biggest problem is razor burn,? said Stormy Daniels, an actress, writer and director. She is also a skeptic. ?I?m not 100 percent sure why anyone would want to see their porn in HD,? she said (Richtell, 2007). Of course the high definition format wars are far from over but in this very special case I think there will be a number of factors to it. Porn will of course be a part, it always is, but this is a time when solid state formats are on the way out and many in the industry are taking tentative steps (a first in porn for new technology).

The reason that the porn industry is the leading force in most new technologies is down to a few factors. Mainly the monetary risk associated with producing a pornographic movie is considerably less that that of most other media. This is why porn can be made cheaply and quickly and be used as a testing ground for this new format. I spoke to Sandie Caine (2008), British actress and producer who said, ? You need to look at emerging technologies, I?m always on the lookout for something new. Is it unique, easier or better and can it make money?? We went on to speak about some of her work and different forms of distributions and discussed the increased anonymity of modern methods such as the internet. ?but it?s not all good for the industry,? she went on to say, ?many sites such as Adultwork pull people away from DVD and online sales. I?ve also been met with piracy problems in the industry.?

But there have been times when technology has saved porn. Video saved porn in the eighties, during the backlash against the industry, without it, restricted to sex cinemas and sex shops hardcore may not have survived. You can shut down the adult cinemas for lewd behavior, can make mail order sales too risky for producers and chase sex shops out of ?good, wholesome? communities. Over time however completely zoning out video porn proved impossible. As adult sections in local video rental stored appeared it was clear porn was here to stay. So we?re back in the video shop where we started only now the dusty gray video rental shop seems so much more alive. Filled with Dvds, mobile phone downloads and interactive porn. Porn has been helped and hindered by technology over the years and technology has always been lead into brave new territory by porn. The future is bright for both technology and porn. New laws are allowing more in the way of pornography as we speak and there are ever increasing ways to view it. Thankfully, no longer is my choice restricted to going up to the counter and handing over some dusty coins for a worn out copy of Debbie Does Dallas.


REFERENCES
Anon (28 Nov 2007) ?Happy Birthday Polaroid - the Camera That Launched Home Grown Porn? viewed at:
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[accessed 10Jan 2008]
Arlidge, Jon ( 3 Mar 2002) ?The Dirty Secret that Drives New Technology: it's Porn? printed in The Guardian.
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Caine, Sandie( 31 Jan 2008) Interview about her experience of technology in the adult industry [personal
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www.redtube.com
www.youporn.com
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www.punternet.com
www.bigsista.com
Many thanks to Sandie Caine for all her help and support in this essay

Copyright - Matthew Bailey 2008 - Brunel University

[spuddy]

promise i will read that later.

[sandie]

Well done Matthew.
I hope u get the final grades u deserve.

Usually i just satisfy myself that i put a smile on peoples faces but now i can say im helping the education system to produce geniuses. lol ; )

[Y3MBailey]

Thanks Sandie... greatly appreciated