Does porn drive technology?

Just after I mention doubts that porn will drive PSP sales, I read news that a company named Guba wants to get rich with video-IPod porn. So is porn driving technology? Do I just need to put porn on a new platform to make it beat the competition? I don't think so.

Imagine two rival systems to project video on the side of your house, enabling you to turn your garden or yard into an open-air cinema. Just a hypothetical case, but it is easy to see how the availability of porn on one of these systems wouldn't make a difference. Nobody would want to project porn clearly visible to his neighbors.

Porn is said to have won the war for VHS against Betamax, and to have played a major part in the adaption of the internet and broadband access. That is probably true, but not just because these technologies make porn more available. They also make porn more private. Instead of risking to be seen while entering a porn cinema, porn video cassettes can be watched in the living room, where the neighbors don't see you. The internet moves porn from the living room, which is still a dangerous place due to your parents/spouse/children seeing you watching porn, to your room. Software can remove all traces on your computer of you ever having watched porn, even if somebody in your household is internet-savy enough to find out otherwise.

A mobile gaming console or IPod are selling because they make activities like playing computer games or listening to music more portable. You can see people with the characteristic white IPod cables in their ears jogging in the park, or sitting in the subway. I somehow have problems picturing these people watching porn on their IPods. In public places it would be hard to prevent other people from glimpsing what is going on on the screen, and earphones aren't always sound-tight. So if you would only watch porn in a private place like your room, why would you want to do it on a portable device with a tiny screen?

There are certainly technology areas which will profit from porn content. Streaming "video on demand" is arguably more useful for porn, which you don't necessarily want to have on your harddrive, than for regular movies, which you probably would rather like to be able to archive and see again. With classic broadband access technologies like ADSL being fast enough for just about anything else, it could be streaming porn at higher resolution which could drive higher-speed broadband technologies like VDSL.

Playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door I was nearly falling of my chair laughing when I heard the the crows in Twilight Town discussing high-speed internet being driven by "feather-loss websites". But common crow wisdom as this might be, not every technology which can display images is automatically better off when somebody starts offering porn for it.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 AM Permanent Link