Pornography : Prosumer in our era

Well, who hasn't visited a pornographic websites before?

Recently, there's bunch of news about hollywood celebrities' home-made porno is leaking outwards onto the internet. This is nothing new for us. It seems that internet become the biggest 'exporter' for pornographic materials. Through new media platforms such as the Internet, we get exposed to millions of sexual materials that challenge our sense of morality and the discourse of identity.

As mentioned in class before, pornography is the leading economic driver for internet growth. I am arguing here that how pornographic changes our identity, perspectives and our society today. Sex has always seen as a taboo, and pornography has always been identify as a taboo because it is sex that is divorced from its original emotions, which is 'love' (Geoffrey Gorer). The society before our era treated pornography as something that is shameful, guilty and filthy. But with the invention of internet and its ability to reach billion of people, the discourse of pornography seems to be going through a drastic change. Our world is bombarded with informations, images, topics and conversations about sex. This is due to the change of media platform through out the years; pornography were originally circulated within the public through traditional printing medias, such as books, papers and et cetera. But when it switch to operates on internet, it floods the world and reach out more widely than it was on printed medium.

This widespread effect has an impact on us in a macro and a micro ways: such as our society on a macro level; as well as our identity on a micro level. Pornography are no longer exclusive to be produce only by big film companies, but at this stage, the notion of 'prosumer' emerged and more and more normal, ordinary people in the society started to produce their own pornography materials, and they actually become products that other people can buy online. That links to my second point, where our identity and relationship with online pornography has been re-constructed. The traditional notion of intimacy no longer have the same meaning, as more and more individuals started to share their intimacy relationship online with billions of other people; and individuals in the society are most likely to get their sexual impressions, educations and stereotypes from online pornographies. Thus, online pornography structured our relationship as well as our attitude with and towards sex.

What really struck me was the increasing amount of homemade pornography materials nowadays. Internet can easily circulate products, informations and so on easily. Therefore, individuals in the society get exposed to different materials that they have never encounter before. Internet re-shape our sense of intimacy, and construct sex as something that does not comes with any consequences, and it can be derived from emotions. In the end, sex becomes a product on the internet, and everyone can just buy it without much thinking. The frightening side of this is that, sex no longer seen as something that is just between two person or a private matter; new media platform offered us a way to commodify even our sexual intimacy.

Online pornography have shifted our perspectives and identity in a subtle but drastic way. We no longer view sex as a taboo, and sex can become a commodity to be buy and sell. The anonymity features of internet also contribute to the fact that anyone can buy or sell anything obscene without worrying one's identity getting exposed.

An advise for people that decided or going to publish your intimate moment of you and your partner : once your material get online, it will never go offline...FOR LIFE.