A very good argument could be made that all technological advances have been propelled by our sexual desires. For most of human history, the argument would have to be that technological advances, most the result of the efforts of men, have served primarily to increase the status of the developer and increase his access to desirable women. Young men do what they can to win the affections of desirable girls. Of course, this is both trivializing the subject and rather reductionist, though likely to evoke at least a wry smile among most. However, in a very real way, sex has been a major motivator behind our modern technology. Steven Horwitz summarizes:
Pornography as the Cutting Edge Where Technology Meets Commerce
There's a great CNN.com article today on the role that porn has played in being the "canary in the coalmine" of not just internet technology but communications technology in general. When new ways of communicating are developed, you can be sure that humans will be happy to pay a premium for their use for sexual purposes. As the article points out, this was true for movies, the telephone, the VCR (and don't forget that's a big part of why VHS beat out Beta was porn), the DVD and the internet. And now 3-D! And of course, sexting.
The CNN article to which he links has more detail:
In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way
It was just days after the release of the iPad -- Apple's slate computer heralded as a tool for gaming, book and magazine reading and Web consumption -- when the announcement arrived.
One of the world's biggest porn companies claimed it had created a way to stream its videos onto the device, skipping the Apple store and its restrictions on salacious content.
The announcement illustrates a widely acknowledged but seldom-spoken truth of the technology world: Whenever there's a new content platform, the adult-entertainment industry is one of the first to adopt it -- if they didn't help create it in the first place.
"It's not necessarily that the porn industry comes up with the ideas, but there's a huge difference in any technology between the idea and the successful application," said Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor at Texas A&M University who teaches the history of technology.
...
"The classic example is the VCR," said Oliver Marc Hartwich, an economist and senior fellow with Centre for Independent Studies, a conservative Australian think tank. "When it was introduced, Hollywood was nervous because the big studios feared piracy. They were even considering suing the VCR producers.
"Not so the adult industry. They saw it as a big new market and seized the opportunity."
On the internet, streaming video, credit-card verification sites, Web referral rings and video technology like Flash all can be traced back to innovations designed to share, and sell, adult content.
Experts attribute much of the success of AOL, the social networking forbearer of sites like Facebook and Twitter, to its private chat rooms -- and anyone who remembers scanning the user-created chats remembers the adults-only nature of many of them.
Websites that require memberships, encryption coding, speedier file-sharing technology -- all can trace their roots back to the adult industry.
3-D is next.
However, despite all the technological advances that Porn has midwifed, none have really been a paradigm shift. At the same time, all of the advances thus far have primed the pump for the truly paradigm shattering, inevitable next step.
What Porn has done up until now, and will continue to expand and intensify with the shift to 3-D Porn, is to democratize what were formerly known as Perversions, but now may be better understood as amoralized fantasies. In Porn, the actors are always voluntarily engaged in sexual behavior that is sanctioned by their presence.
The panoply of sexual fantasies have always been remarkable for two elements:
Sexual fantasies have always tended to be ritualistic, ie carefully choreographed, and they tended to involve sexual behavior that was not typically available to the fantasist in his or her reality.
In general, the types of sexual activity which arouse a person have traditionally been stable constructs across the life span. The widespread availability of Pornography have changed this aspect of sexual fantasizing in ways which have not been well studied. While there remain many people whose sexuality is determined and solidified in early adolescense, the availability of Porn means that just as the adolescent has traditionally tried on many different personality attributes throughout his progression to adulthood, today not only adolescents, but adults as well, have the opportunity to test their sexuality, via fantasy, through a wide range of behaviors. If voyeurism allows the watcher to participate in fantasy in the sexual acts he views, the repertoire of potential acts has expanded exponentially.
We have gone from the Missionary position for most, with a full range of sexual appetitive behavior reserved for only the very wealthiest and debauched elites, to the entire sexual smörgåsbord now being available to all, starting at a very young age. I believe this has changed the way we experience and relate to our own bodies and others, but, again, do not think this has been well studied. It is certainly a part of the burgeoning Narcissism that permeates our culture, an increasingly voyeuristic culture, I hasten to add. The availability of Porn designed and directed at all different tastes and temperaments means that one does not have to develop one's sexuality in relation to another person, but can develop a fully formed (though unrelated) sexuality in isolation.
The Future of Sex is rapidly approaching. The relationship of Sex and technology will come to fruition with the advent of fully immersive virtual reality. The use of haptic suits and 3-D goggles, or some approximation, will allow the voyeur to enter into his own sexual fantasies in ways never before possible. This has the potential to shake our concept of the self and our understanding of intimacy; it is a truly disruptive technology, and this technology will arrive much sooner than most people realize.
I will return to this topic in a future post.
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