Adult entertainment:How technology advances

In his 2011 book Leonardo to the Internet: Technology andCulture from the Renaissance to the Present, Thomas J. Misa opines that “no force in the twentieth century had a greater influence in defining and shaping technology than the military”. But with all due respect to the military innovations of Teflon, microchips and nuclear power, I would argue that there is a greater influence on how people use technology, especially in regards to communicating on the internet, and that influence is pornography.

In today’s world, where communication technology is advancing quicker than the average individual can keep up, savvy media and tech types are always looking to what is happening in the world of adult entertainment because it leads the way when it comes to innovative technology. Acting as both trailblazer and guinea pig, the porn business usually is followed by the mainstream in adopting technology a few years later, once they have become proven successes. This can be seen in many of the functions that are considered necessities in today’s on-line, interactive environment, which had their humble beginnings in the shady world of “smut”.

And this was well before the cyber age. According to a 2009 article fromthe British online publication The Independent, pornography was one of the first things printed in books, and quickly found its way into images. The Polaroid camera – not to mention its successor, the digital camera – was introduced so that certain types of photos could be developed without being seen by a film-processing technician. The Super 8 projector and camera – as well as their offspring the VCR and camcorder –indulged those who did not wish to view their films in seedy cinemas or those who wish to produce their own films, all in the name of keeping one’s porn collection private and safely away from other people’s eyes.

More recently, purveyors of porn are responsible for some the most ubiquitous aspects of the modern internet experience offers Patchen Barss, writer of 2011’s TheErotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenbergto Google. For example, prior to video conferencing being a daily occurrence in the boardrooms and offices of the business world, webcams were exclusively used for private webcasts on adult sites. A Dutch porn company called Red Light District began video streaming in 1994, years before cute cat videos became daily fodder on YouTube. But most lucrative of porn-driven technologies has had a huge effect on world of e-commerce. Before items were being put up for sale on craigslist, eBay and kijiji, before on-line retail giants Amazon and iTunes were peddling books and music, and before all the aforementioned sites were using PayPal to process their payments, pornography sites were doing it first, selling DVDs, photos, and merchandise and coming up with self-protecting solutions to make credit card transactions safe for the wary consumers and nervous financial institutions that feared the risk of web fraud.

We have come to expect our internet interactions to come with certain amounts of privacy, discretion, and security. So why not have the porn industry lead the way in dealing with our trusted technological solutions and innovations? Privacy, discretion, and security are the three things that the purveyors (and consumers) of porn seek most, so they should be very good at it.

This is an abridged version of a university paper I recently wrote.
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