Make Way for the New Porn

It seems as though hell has frozen over. Trekkie Monster's words which he made so popular on Avenue Q (in the song The Internet is for Porn) are becoming less true as the days pass. This morning I was surprised to come across an article that said that internet traffic due to porn (aka everybody's favorite secret online past time) has significantly decreased. Ironically, what has been gaining more ground and has been slowly replacing porn is to me the anti-porn: I'm talking about social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Beebo, and the like.

I use the term "ironic" to define the switch in majority of the user's interests online because it seems to be a migration from a platform of deviance into one of conformity. In the same way that studies show that people have evolved in the way their daily hours are spent (on average spending a third of a day online or doing computer activity of some sort), people have changed the way they utilize the internet, particularly at the most personal, most intimate level. Knowing personally of quite a handful of guys who had in fact, started going online to discover the wealth of porn stashed there, I find this new development welcome, albeit surprising.

This phenomenon has been brought to our attention by Bill Tancer, author of "Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters". He used a program which analyzed millions of people's websearches to reflect the behavioral trends of internet users, painting a newer picture of internet pop culture today. His book says that internet searches for porn has decreased to about 10% to 20% a decade ago, a figure which has not changed or shifted dramatically until now. Particularly, users within the 18-24 age range (culturally known to be most porn-curious?) have been responsible for this significant change. Instead, it seems as though most people within this age bracket find creating personal profiles on networking websites a better use of their time.

While it would be nice to think that this shift can be attributed to a shift in character (for the better), it is also quite possible that the shift is merely indicative of an over-saturation of porn online. After all, porn has become so accessible that pay-for-porn websites are experiencing tough competition from free websites where porn can be accessed via streaming, very much like YouTube. In fact, I am sure, the idea for websites such as these took wings because of the eponymous site. Among the few that I have heard of are Pornotube, XTube, and YouPorno, though I am sure there are millions more of the same sort.

Yet there is hope. If something as wholesome (optimistically) as social networking can detract from the dark allure of pornography, then maybe there is hope that we will develop even better uses for our time online.

For now, I suppose, parents should at least be thankful that their children seem to be too preoccupied with Facebook to satisfy their other worldly curiosities. While the statement "the Internet is for porn" is now a cliche, the cliche "Curiosity killed the cat" still rings true.