Outline
Every minute of the global day, there is a great deal of loneliness and fantasy fulfillment taking place or yearning for satisfaction. Patterson (106-7) offers this treatise about how adult Web site offerings have unalterably changed the nature of porn consumption.
Strong Support Offered for Primary Argument
As a teacher who inhabits the intersection between arts and digital culture, the author offers an analysis that is a mix of familiarity with information technology and interpreting human want and desire. He brings to the subject matter sustained exposure to the beginnings of Internet pornography; that much is obvious.
Perhaps the strongest argument Patterson offers for the altered experience of pornography is that intimacy on the Internet has expanded the boundaries of participation. Repeated references to amateur sites offering continuous access to “A day in the life of ___” and to Web chat rooms inhabited by strippers are valid discoveries about “remote intimacy” never before available on any medium. But then, this ponderous academic piece was written long before Twitter proliferated in the world of Web 2.0.
A Critique of Weaknesses
Beyond the obvious quibble that, five years after the article in question was published, much has changed in the public’s experience of the Internet, Patterson is afflicted by a lot of misconceptions about the nature of the pursuit of pornography and the role of Web access in this evergreen human desire.
With respect to the less important weaknesses of the article, the author shows himself decidedly overawed by art as a subject, by the illusion of sophistication being preferable to clarity in choice of words, and by the role of the computer as “alien interface” when it is in fact just one more medium for display of pornography.
Patterson stretches the Time magazine cover graphic as a metaphor for the alienation inherent in Internet porn and the power of machine over man. Why, he asserts in “Categorization and the Truth of Desire,” Web-based porn actually provokes a bodily response! But we are disappointed to discover he meant solely keystrokes and mouse glides.
The author is also quite mistaken in interpreting delayed gratification as vital to the consumption of pornography in this context. He ascribes undeserved importance to the sign-up process and to search for just the right class of fantasy one desires as intrinsic to sexual satisfaction. In the age of broadband access and YouTube, we know now that the author was merely rationalizing the narrow bandwidths of his Web 1.0 era. But the author is right about the ceaseless search for more and more pornography; he just gets the reason wrong.
In fact, the most damning evaluation one can make about this article is how the author overlooks the fact that all pornography is fantasy, no matter what medium it arrives in. In addition, voyeurism is central to any type of porn, not just the amateur sites, interactivity, or “collapsed distance” as proximity that Patterson would have us believe is specific to porn on the Internet. Quite simply, fantasy and voyeurism motivate the “seriality and repetition” that the author wrongly ascribes to Internet porn alone.
Works Cited
Patterson, Zabet. “Going Online: Pornography in the Online Era.” In Williams, Linda (ed.) Porn Shades, Duke University Press, 2004.