Netporn

DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics

By: Katrien Jacobs

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eText | 20 August 2007 | Edition Number 1

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Netporn delves into the aesthetics and politics of sexuality in the era of do-it-yourself (DIY) Internet pornography. Katrien Jacobs, drawing on digital media theory and interviews with Web porn producers and consumers, offers an unprecedented critical analysis of Web culture as digital artistry and of the corresponding heightened government surveillance and censorship of the Internet. Netporn features Web users who question the goals of global commercial porn industries-whether they are engaged in Usenet fringes, video blogging, peer-to-peer distribution, porn art collectives, or decadent amateurism. Emphasizing gender and cultural differences, Jacobs shows how the creative uses of netporn images and services are important ways of exploring or redefining the "network body" and indispensable ingredients of a maturing network society.

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Katrien Jacobs's Netporn is an eyewitness account of sex life on the new digital frontier and an analytical report on how sensual imagination and activity is changing our world. From personal investigation and interviews with Internet porn producers and consumers, Jacobs is able to mark the evolving contradictions of an area where sex as freedom and expression runs up against commercial exploitation and government censorship. This up-to-date investigation makes concrete the sometimes vague and hyperbolic discussions of digital networking, and thus it carries on a substantial description of the interactive exchange between new media technologies and the new social relations, behaviors, and body functions. Thoughtful, sober, and adventurous, this is THE landmark study of new media for our time.