Sex largely shapes how people use the internet today. The porn industry ushered in JPEGs, which allow picture-sharing, and drove the creation of online credit card payment systems and advertising revenue schemes. Mark Zuckerberg even created Facebook to find attractive women at Harvard. But the internet also shaped people’s desires and how they meet and connect.
It’s all part of the new book “How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.” Author Samantha Cole is a senior editor for Motherboard.
She says that before images, people hooked up through text-based bulletin board systems, where they’d post a message and others would reply. This also relied on phone modems, so most people were local, since calling long distance was expensive.
JPEGs started with Playboy
Being able to display pictures on a screen began in the early 1970s, when someone brought a Playboy magazine into a computer science lab, where mostly men were developing image processing techniques, Cole explains.
“They were looking for an image that would be the standard … for processing. They were using baskets of fruit and flowers and things like that. And it was getting boring. And they also needed something more dynamic, they needed people. And someone saw the centerfold of a woman named Lena. … They scanned in her face from the shoulders up. … And that became the standard for image processing for decades, well into the 90s and 2000s.”
Protecting minors
Meanwhile, there was a lot of concern about what kids could access on the internet, plus efforts to regulate and legislate what people could do related to porn.
In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, and section 230 was a way for websites to not be liable for what people do on them.
Afterward, porn sites had to ensure minors weren’t using their sites, so to verify people’s ages, they come up with credit card payment plans and monthly subscriptions.
Innate human dilemmas
Now porn is free, thanks to Porn Hub. But in the early days, webmasters who set up their own studios were concerned about so-called tube sites, where people uploaded stolen content.
“Not only did you have people stealing from the membership sites that worked really hard to make the content good … you also had just people losing that idea that it's something that you should pay for,” Cole says.
With huge access to various content, she points out that people largely don’t discuss consent, safe words, whether they should communicate their interests before engaging in sex, and the fact that what they see online is fantasy and not reality.
“These sites are designed … to keep you on the site. … That's a … really harmful attitude toward design. … A lot of the most amazing things about the internet are connecting with people, and then getting off the internet and meeting them in real life, or exploring your interests and then bringing them back to that community. … They are really innate human problems that go into how society works and how capitalism works.”
The future: artificial intelligence
Cole says people are using A.I. daily, and the technology is moving faster than they can understand.
“There are people who … [are] using apps to talk to someone, and that someone is [an] A.I. … It's feeding them back exactly what they want to hear, or it's sexting with them. … And if that's preventing someone from feeling lonely or that's the way that they work through some stuff in their life, I think that's harmless and good.”
She continues, “But I think what A.I. is missing is a lot of the stuff that makes us human in a real-life situation. So talking to someone is much different when you're talking to another human than you are talking to a computer that can mimic you or mirror you. You're missing a lot of the facial cues and even like things like scent or … body language.”