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March 14/06: "Best
Before" Dates
Every now and then you
have to look back at how far the Internet has come, how fast, and just
take a deep breath. I had one such moment recently while reading a book
on Internet porn by Frederick S. Lane III, Obscene Profits: The
Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. Some very interesting
stuff, but, since it was published in 2000, now almost totally out of
date. Broadband was just a glimmer on the cyber-horizon. No mention of
Google. (The only search engine/portal referenced is Yahoo!.) And as for
the numbers . . . they are just unreal. Back then some people were
apparently estimating that there were as many as 60,000 adult websites
online! Can you believe it? And they thought that was a lot! Things
move so quickly. I even tried looking up some of
Lane's footnotes to online sources, only to find that all of the URLs
were dead links. Even the ones to major mainstream media websites. But
this is the same for almost any footnote you try to look up online. I
don't know why they bother. What the fuck is the life-span of the
average URL anyway? Probably a little more than a year I'd say. What
really struck me reading Lane however was how new the Internet is.
Mosaic was the first image-based browser and it didn't come out until
1993. We didn't really have browsers that "surfed the Net"
until just 10 years ago! Before that it was all just e-mails and
newsgroups and bulletin boards. I remember all that stuff, but it seems
like a lifetime ago now. But for porn (which has
always been the major driver of the Internet anyway) you have to take
that sense of future shock up yet another notch. Which is
why I made a point on the About
page to draw your attention to that most valuable indicator: the date of
the review. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to keep reviews
current. Movie reviewers and book reviewers have it easy. They're not
trying to hit a moving target. But reviewing porn sites is a
never-ending task because they keep updating, upgrading, changing
direction, or . . . none of the above. Sometimes they just give up. And
you have to look out for that too. So no
question about it, most reviews should be considered as having a
"best before" date. They are snapshots. I try and do as
many re-visits as I can, but given how much new stuff there is always
coming out, it's kind of hopeless. But
this is just the way a lot of porn is. It's nothing if not fashionable.
I mean, how long does it take before something is considered
"vintage" these days? It can't be long. I grew up with the
porn of the 1980s. That stuff was my bread and butter. I find I can't
even look at it now. Even old favourites from that decade almost disgust
me today. Have I changed so much? And then
there's the technical side of things. Even with all the money most of
them are making I have to say I feel sorry for the guys running these
sites. They have to constantly keep upgrading their video to offer us
spoiled surfers the quality we feel we've come to expect (and that
faster connections and better monitors demand). That shit is expensive.
You have to wonder how it's going to change things. As even Lane was
pointing out back in 2000, the days when any dufus with a computer and a
modem could set up a website are gone. That might not be a totally bad
thing (it helps to keep out some cheap scammers), but I think it also
means we're going to see more uniformity, that we're going to lose some
of that indie spirit that has made Internet porn thus far so exciting. Oh
well. Let's face it, we live in an age of disposable culture. And
there's nothing in that culture more disposable than porn. At least with
the advent of the Internet it's become a lot easier to get rid of. Just
wiping files from your hard drive. No more heading to the curb like
Krusty the Clown in that Simpsons episode with a big box of
"used porn." But is there any limit to this industry's ability
to keep pumping out such awesome amounts of content? I mean, I'm not
sure of the numbers but since the Internet came along the worldwide
production of porn must have gone through the roof. Playboy and
Penthouse only had to publish a magazine once a month with two or three
pictorials. Think of all the websites now that update weekly, or daily!
Might we expect things to slow down at some point? Or are we now
addicted not just to these images but to their speed?
Current
Rant
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