'Pornofoto - a cornucopia'

Part 1
What should I write, I like porn? I use porn hmm that seems so simple, no purgatorial guilt not at all loaded with confessional catharsis? So far so good, now perhaps I can identify my project. I want to skim the surface of what we are consuming. I mean the pornographic imagery or at least I think I do. The trouble with talking about porn is that there never seems to be a good time for dialogue about it. With discourse perhaps narrower than other less taboo-stricken image genre perhaps a good starting point is whether or not I can discover the locus of current discourse? Hmm sounds reasonable If nothing the research will keep me busy. Interestingly the bulk of this study will be web-led, because nothing changes faster, so if I’m even going to get a handle on the thing I’ll be gleaning this as a primary resource.

Contextually this study will look at the currency of pornography in perhaps one of its most essential forms the still image, along the way I will identify the likely points of crossover between stills and moving image. Perhaps the goal of this project is as much an exploration, of a cultural phenomenon that continues to defy easy compartmentalisation, as it is an inquiry into the psychological schema of the image as porn.

The first thing you realise when you start writing about porn is that it’ll pretty much render most of your search engine enquiries incredulous. The very word causes, Results 1 - 10 of about 246,000,000 for porn (0.18 seconds), Google 2009-02-26. Now two hundred and forty six million results represents perhaps a subject better suited to a life’s endeavour but the thing of it is, that only represents pages cached with porn written in script somewhere. To take into account the true order and magnitude of the statistics you would need to add the results for images, Results 1 - 20 of about 6,080,000 (0.03 seconds).


That’s only from one search engine and maybe represents duplicated results I don’t have the stamina to back check these. It is often presented that porn statistically represents a majority stake in the total content available, James Stoner writing for the The Witherspoon Institute’s ‘Public Discourse’ - ‘estimates that as much as 35% of all content on the internet is pornographic’ J. Stoner ’09. This author believes that most if not all this type evidence is a misrepresentation. More often than not these types of statistics bear no real scrutiny. They are an unfortunate part of the freedom of the Internet. The truth is nobody actually knows, which is disappointing though not entirely unexpected.

I stated that the math above contained some statistical flaws, Imagine trying to write an algorithm that could calculate not only the total pay per view content but also the peer to peer material. ( difficult if not impossible to characterise). I believe the best point of departure in the face of such an impossible calculation is simply to assume the number is very large. Then logically the total number of consumers therefore is greater than the total content. With the world population currently estimated at 6.76 billion and even accounting for those who don’t have access to a computer it is my conceit that the number would be colossal. Even then you would still need to calculate the total hard copy of pornographic material including film, video etc That is not the purpose of this piece but serves as a guide to any notions of audience that I use herein.



· http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.02.09.002.pdart