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Peter Cochrane's Hard Drive 2001 The New Age.. ..of Pornography WHEN photography first became commercially available, a very old industry soon realised its potential. The ability to create high-quality pornographic images was suddenly freely available and distribution quickly became widespread. The next major advance was the development of films, followed by video recorders, and more recently the internet and digital cameras. Today the soft and hard porn industry is ubiquitous, and at a price that everyone can afford. Most people deny that they ever watch pornography, but the figures tell a different story. Some years ago when the web was first being developed, I was engaged in some studies concerning the porn industry, looking at its availability, the lack of national controls, the meaningless nature of international borders and the ineffectiveness of national laws. The most important aspect of the work was the threat to children and the creation of "safe" sites. At first, it was necessary to search for porn sites. The content was crudely presented and access was badly engineered. Over the past decade, the industry has become all-pervasive and sophisticated, with the best engineered sites and interfaces. You no longer have to try hard to find really good quality porn, and once you have logged on, they will track you down and images appear thick and fast on your screen. Not surprisingly, the dominant searches on the web are sex-related, and it has become a very big industry. As I travel, I occasionally scan the adult pay-TV channels in hotels and homes, and from time to time search the web. As far as I can see, almost everything imaginable is available for free, or for a few dollars. The content is vast in breadth and depth with sites spanning a wide range of specialist tastes in straight, soft and hard porn, through to fetish activities that you really wish you had never seen. Should we be worried about all this? Should we turn a blind eye and continue to liberalise and relax our laws and policing until we are on a par with continental Europe? Or should we try and clamp down? Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, we have no choice. There is no chance of establishing any effective control. So what of those evil people who seek to involve children and other innocent groups? The immediate reaction is to say we must stop them and apply absolutely draconian controls. Like much of our new eWorld and eConomy, however, I suspect we should do the opposite. We should let these individuals and groups expose themselves (excuse the pun) on the web. In reality they are never going to go away, and they will be very difficult to track down if we drive them underground. Rather than panic at the rising tide of pornography, I think we should relax, draw a line at what society deems to be acceptable and focus our limited resources on those dedicated to corrupting or harming the young, innocent and defenceless. The good news is that we can do this at very low cost and very effectively over the web. We should also remember that the good things about the web outweigh the bad pornographic things. |