All media, if they are to get a jump-start in the market and become successful, must address themselves to mass drives – those things we hold in common as basic human needs … And now we have come to the “digital age” where all information and images can be digitized; where all bits are equal, but some are hotter than others … Progress marches on. In time, robotics will deliver household servants and sex slaves.
Predictor: Van Der Leun, Gerard
Prediction, in context:In the March/April 1993 issue of Wired magazine, Gerard Van Der Leun writes an essay on sex and the Internet: ”There is absolutely nothing new about the prurient relationship between technology and sexuality … All media, when they are either new enough or become relatively affordable, are used by outlaws to broadcast unpopular images or ideas. When a medium is created, the first order of business seems to be the use of it in advancing religious, political, or sexual notions and desires. Indeed, all media, if they are to get a jump-start in the market and become successful, must address themselves to mass drives – those things we hold in common as basic human needs … And now we have come to the ‘digital age’ where all information and images can be digitized; where all bits are equal, but some are hotter than others … Sex has come rocketing out of the closet and into the terminals of anyone smart enough to boot up FreeTerm. As a communications industry, sex has transmogrified itself from the province of a few large companies and individuals into a massive cottage industry … It is a distinct harbinger of things to come that ‘Needless to say…’ letters now appearing online are better than those published in Penthouse Forum, or that sexual images in binary form make up one of the heaviest data streams on the Internet, and that ‘amateur’ erotic home videos are the hottest new category in the porn shops … Progress marches on. In time, robotics will deliver household servants and sex slaves.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: ‘This Is A Naked Lady’: Behind Every New Technology Is … Sex?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/cybersex_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney