Feature Article
E-pornography Offers Opportunities for Research
by Gena Asher
Today, "adult entertainment" is a $56 billion a year industry around the globe, including print video and retail products as well as web business. In fact, adult e-commerce sites account for the most paid revenue on the Web, about $2 billion, and appear to be among the few such businesses to be recession-proof.
JUST SAYING THE WORD "PORNOGRAPHY" ELICITS A SPECIFIC RESPONSE, WHETHER SQUEAMISHNESS OR TITILLATION OR SOMETHING IN BETWEEN. Perhaps because of the stigma that clings to the porn industry, it continues to be invisible in much of the academic literature on the information society and digital economy.
"In this school, we theorize about the information society, but if we look at the scholarly literature, we see there is virtually no mention of aspects of sexual representation, nor discussion of how new communication technologies may affect the distribution of pornographic materials," says SLIS Dean Blaise Cronin.
Pornography always has capitalized on the latest technology, probably beginning with stone tablets, advancing to the printing press, telephones, television, videos and, now, e-commerce and the web. While these weren't designed with the porn industry in mind, technologies drew the interest of porn entrepreneurs who quickly adapted them into their business practices.
Today, "adult entertainment" is a $56 billion a year industry around the globe, including print video and retail products as well as web business. In fact, adult e-commerce sites account for the most paid revenue on the web, about $2 billion, and appear to be among the few such businesses to be recession-proof.
"We know from statistics that there is a large market and real human interest in this subject," says Cronin. "In the U.S. alone, porn revenue is more than movies and box office receipts, more than income from the performing arts, and more than earnings of professional football, baseball, and basketball combined. Globally, adult entertainment revenue is twice that of Disney."
Cronin has long been intrigued by the research possibilities offered by the adult entertainment sector, a topic he explored with SLIS visiting scholar and Napier University (Scotland) professor Elisabeth Davenport in their paper, "E-Rogenous Zones: Positioning Pornography in the Digital Economy." Their work was published earlier this year in The Information Society (17:33-48, 2001), the journal edited by SLIS professorRob Kling.
"(The authors) 'normalize' online pornography by examining it as another interesting segment of the emerging digital economy," Kling wrote in his introduction in the journal. "The article identifies the importance of carnal knowledge in discussions of information societies and knowledge societies."
These discussions should be familiar to SLIS students, who explore technology and its social interaction throughout the curriculum. Cronin says one obvious place to begin such exploration would be the technological advances pornographers have initiated or at least enhanced as they brought their products into the e-commerce world.
"Pornographers are at the leading edge of technological innovation, power, and sophistication," he explains. For example, banner advertising and other promotional efforts, such as referral fees for sales from click-throughs and partnership programs, are used extensively in porn sites. Site owners quickly adapted e-commerce innovations such as customer billing and encryption technology as well.
Innovative web design and applications for doing business on the Internet led one Sun Microsystems spokeswoman to comment that the way companies know their new applications are effective is to look at how they're used in the porn world, Cronin says.
From a business point of view, these companies have launched their own public stock offerings. Some are "repurposing," selling their materials via several formats. A customer can buy a look at a video online, delivered via e-commerce techniques to a computer, or can buy the video through pay-per-view cable or satellite television. Or, the customer may buy the video itself, either online with secure encryption or simply print out an order form and mail it in the old-fashioned way. Still, the "product" essentially is just one video, delivered in various ways. This selling method has led Playboy's Cyber Club to claim it "isn't just a web site, it's a community," according to its promotional pitch.
With such dollars at stake, mainstream businesses aren't willing to miss out on this type of revenue: Several are expanding into the porn industry, such as motel chains offering porn pay-per-view in their properties, while others quietly buy or merge with porn companies.
The rise of porn on the Web offers a chance to explore privacy issues as well, a topic many libraries and other information professionals are wrestling with, especially given the rise of legal issues and government interventions such as the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA). SLIS library science students, specifically, will enter careers where they most likely will face such issues as Internet access for library patrons, including children, to materials that may be deemed pornographic.
"This is something we routinely discuss in courses," Cronin said. "Virtually every public library is wired to the Internet and in many libraries, there are restrictions on what a user may view. Librarians must be well-versed in the issues of intellectual freedom and the legal ramifications of their Internet policies. This is where pornography has a direct impact upon librarians."
The complex interaction of society and technology, then, certainly should extend to an examination of the porn industry. Cronin and Davenport suggest in their paper that a framework based on "social shaping of technology" could be devised and applied to this industry.
"It's not that technology causes things to happen, but products emerge because of the interaction between people and technology, and this sector offers a tremendous opportunity to explore this interaction," Cronin says.
"If we can put aside moral, ideological, or political positions, here is a significant phenomenon with interesting intellectual angles, significant business implications, profound legal implications, and ethical and societal issues rich in research opportunities."
Photograph courtesy of The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Inc., and was featured in an exhibition titled The Art of Desire: Erotic Treasures from The Kinsey Institute www.indiana.edu/~kinsey
Posted December 14, 2001