Desire is the mother of invention?
The idea of porn being in the forefront of web development is a generally accepted
truism. Among the earliest references to that idea that I'm aware of is an article,
This Is A Naked
Lady, by Gerald Van Der Leum, in the very first issue of Wired magazine.
There we read:
Sex is a virus that infects new technology first
(Actually, that exact quote doesn't show up in the still-on-line version from
Wired, though it does in another
copy of the article on the web site of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.)
In the introduction to her book, Regina Lynn also makes the observation that:
it's no secret that sex is one of the primary drivers of technological innovation.
Is this really true? A quite
extensive article on the website of Caslon Analytics, a "research, analysis
and strategies consultancy" firm in Australia, tries to answer that question. From what I can see, this
seems to be a serious group of people who've done their research. They examine
various aspects of the "porn as innovator" meme, quoting from a wide
variety of not necessarily reliable sources, before
suggesting that though there's truth to the claim, it's not as extensive as we
may have been led to believe. The materials that they quote are quite engaging,
but when it comes time to make a call, they're exceedingly careful:
As we have suggested in discussing the dot-com boom and domain name speculation, the "buying frenzy" was another episode in the long history of behavioural finance and shouldn't be attributed to iffy figures from government agencies or voracious demand for adult content. Few adult content providers were floated during or after the bubble; among those that were the differential between their prices and reported earnings were less than those for a range of dot coms such as Amazon.com or Yahoo.com.
I suppose that what we should learn from this is that economic consulting firms
don't like to be too committal.
Go to: The plain brown paper envelope column.