Over the last 10 years, the porn industry, like many pre-digital media industries, has been negatively affected by the rise of digital networked technology, resulting in decreased revenue from traditional outlets. This has resulted from new digital platforms like Tube sites and cam sites cannibalizing their revenue, the first of which presents clips uploaded by users and porn companies, while the latter features performers directly interacting with users through video streams. While pornography has always encouraged interactivity through fan clubs, meet and greets with stars, and conferences, and through the its nature as as erotially stimulating body genre, these new digital platforms encourage much more active and direct interactions between content and consumer and performer and user. Tube sites encourage users to be curators and provide the technology for social networking, while cam sites facilitate, for a price, textual and audio/visual interactions between performers and users. Both the cam sites and cam performers have created diverse forms of interaction: the sites programming controls that allow for private, exclusive, and group interactions, while the performers have been particularly ingenuitive in fashioning traditional games like Keno, prize wheels, highest tip awards, video games, and others to their new digital environment. As well, sex toy manufacturers have crafted teledildonic devices that respond to user payments, resulting in tactile erotic stimulation prompted by users. This paper will detail the historical developments of porn interactivity, the various contemporary theories of media interactivity, and the promises of various media during their Blue Sky moments to determine how digital networked pornography complicates our understanding of interactivity and fulfills some of the promises made by proponents of previous emergent media.
About the presenterMichael D High
Michael D. High is a lecturer at Fordham University in the Department of Communication and Media Studies. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University in 2005. He recently completed his doctorate in Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University. His dissertation on portrayals of piracy in cinema, anti-piracy campaigns, and the Swedish Pirate Movement is titled, Piratical Designations: Power and Possibility in Representations of Piracy.