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Pornography & Technology: Buddies for Life?

Pornography is one of the most frowned upon human activities(hobbies), considered by many as a vice. Wikipedia describes it as Pornography or porn is the depiction of explicit sexual subject matter for the purpose of sexually exciting the viewer. Pornography is mostly associated with a male audience, with most men having viewed pornography in their lifetime. Many men will consider someone viewing pornography to be indulging in a vice, however, the same men will view, purchase and enjoy pornography out of public view. The question therefore, is where you view the pornography and the ethics behind the pornographic material been viewed. In fact, pornography is so popular that it has been associated with the evolution of technology, and the adaptation of some emerging technology over some other incumbent form. In some cases, inferior technology has trumped over some superior technology due to the pornographic foot print of inferior technology.

In this article, we shall heavily refer to an academic research document(by Peter Johnson) pertaining to this issues.

Pornography, apparently, is mostly responsible for the existence of the English and Italian languages, which evolved from some other medieval languages. The pornographic media to blame for this are the novels(or rather tales) Canterbury Tales by George Chaucer and Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. The two were hugely popular collections of tales written in English and Italian dialects respectively. The tales were heavily laden with sex hence leading to their popularity. Before this, the London citizens equally spoke French and English while the Italians spoke more of Latin. The fact that the tales were read out to the mostly illiterate population resulted in their source dialects been adopted in England and Italy.

The printing press was the next major invention, and of course the Bible, legal, scientific and scholarly texts were the first to heavily utilise the printing press. However, the pornographic works of Pietro Aretino's Postures and Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel became very popular once they were put into press. They are a collection of erotic engravings of sexual positions.You can Google them(Not Safe For Work).

Photography was the next popular invention, and pornography was in the limelight again. During the 1860's U.S. Civil war, soldiers demanded letters accompanied by pornographic photo's from their spouses back at home. The pornographic literature that was making its way to the front line was so immense that the U.S. congress decided to intervene by passing a law that banned pornography in the mail, which came into been after the war was already over.

Then along came Cable T.V. , where people paid to have shows and movies cabled to their homes, and what would these people want to pay to watch. You guessed it, most early Cable T.V. adopters apparently were paying to watch blue shows at home. This was then followed by the biggest revolution in home entertainment, the Video tape. There were two video tape formats which were battling out for adoption, the superior Betamax by Sony and the inferior VHS by JVC. Then porn came into the scene, and became widely available on VHS, and that was the end of the superior Betamax.The JVC board must have ploughed back their profits to pornography for their critical backing!Pornography has also been attributed to the growth of the premium 900(0800) numbers amongst other technologies.

When it comes to the individual level, our research has shown that many people (male) adopt technological advancements (the internet, video/camera phones, T.V., video/DVD players) in the pursuit of pornography. We found out that when most people activated inetrnet on their mobile devices, the first thing they sought were links to pornography sites and downloads. So do most people who start going to cybercafes to surf- they go there after hearing that there is a lot of pornography on the internet.If you doubt me on this, airlines have recently introduced in flight internet. Well, the passengers were quick to notice that, and the first place they visited was home: pornography sites. Take a look at this phenomenon at American Airlines.

In case you have a technology interest that fails to pick up, you now have a hint of how you can make it popular!

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