How to Thrive in the Digital Age by Tom Chatfield

Author:Tom Chatfield [Chatfield, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447213055
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

6.

On Becoming Less than Human

1.

Pornography, wrote J.G. Ballard in the foreword to his 1973 novel Crash, is ‘the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way’. It was an exploitation he linked explicitly to technology, appending to this most disturbing of his fictions a question that has only become more pointed over the four decades since: ‘Do we see, in the car-crash, the portents of a nightmare marriage between technology, and our own sexuality? . . . Is there some deviant logic unfolding here, more powerful than that provided by reason?’

No account of living with technology would be complete without taking sexuality into account; and the most obvious place to begin exploring the ‘deviant logic’ of their melding is the astounding volume of pornography to be found on digital networks today.

Contrary to popular belief, ‘sex’ is not the most searched-for term on the internet. If you ask Google about ‘sex’, it will offer just under two and a half billion results: enough to beat most enquiries but, charmingly, still less than a third of the more than seven billion results for ‘love’. The key point, though, is not how much raw material is available, but how accessible it is. Online, you are never more than a search and a click away from porn. What was once a taboo – requiring a visit to a specialist retailer, bounded by age and access restrictions – is now mundane. If you want pornography, you can get it: instantly, anonymously, free of both monetary and emotional cost. And in this, pornography is almost exactly like everything else in the digital realm. It’s normal, in the sense that it’s just another part of the service.

Pornography has itself been altered by the internet. For a start, it has lost whatever residual innocence or coyness it may once have had. Like every other part of the entertainment industry, porn is now in competition with both itself and everything else. This means that an ineffably lowest-common-denominator business has generally become still cheaper, nastier and more ingenious in outdoing itself – and the distinction more blurred between consumption and participation, staged and real.

Not only are you never more than a click away from most things you can think of online; you are also never alone. No matter how bizarre, unusual, eclectic or even illegal your tastes – in matters of sex and pretty much anything else – there will be others like you out there, armed with advice, forums, systems for meeting, and discrete security protocols as needed. Tell the world what you want and, if the world also contains someone who’d like to give it to you, it’s likely that technology can bring you together.

Consider the ‘personals’ section of the world’s most successful classified advertising website, Craigslist. This section comes, today, in nine flavours: platonic, women seeking women, women seeking men, men seeking women, men seeking men, misc romance, casual encounters, ‘missed connections’ (for winning the attention of someone you’ve seen around) and ‘rants and raves’ (for praise and abuse).

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