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The relationship between intimacy and technology is dynamic and transformative. Adult entertainment providers were early adopters of the Internet and directly influenced its development. Meanwhile, digital communication has changed our consumption of pornography, how we date, and how we seek pleasure.
There is increasing concern that Internet-mediated sex is having a negative impact on humans. And what does the future hold? If you choose to conduct your own web searches on the ideas and issues discussed, you may be presented with adult content and material that you may find distressing. It is in equal parts an exploration, a celebration, and critical evaluation of how sex has changed tech, and how tech has changed sex. When it comes to intimacy, we can observe another trend.
The consumption of digital content and the experience of intimacy through IT is so embedded in most of our lives that such an artificial distinction is now meaningless. The chat lines popular in the s still exist, but phone sex remains frozen in time because technological developments turned the phone into a multifunctional pocket computer.
Why have just voice sex when you can choose from voice, video, photos, text, or a richer, combined experience? When an aspect of human life goes digital, researchers like me rejoice because it means we have access to new data sources. Figure 1. Top 10 websites worldwide all industries December data from Semrush [3]. Even this limited dataset appears to confirm that mobile technology now dominates our use of the web. The trend is even more marked for the adult content domains pornhub.
