Column 7; Porn

Do people actually buy porn? I mean, someone must, otherwise they'd never sell it. But I've never been at a regular newstand and seen a transaction for a Playboy. Ever. Or in airports, all the magazine shops have Playboy, Hustler, Esquire, and the rest. But you never see people buying them.

Yet I hear tell that pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry, so someone must be buying the mags. I imagine a lot of the transactions are online these days. A fact-finding mission found that you can read all the articles and see all the girls Playboy has to offer each month online. Not only that, but there are special features that are vailable online-only. I didn't find out what they were, but my best guess is more naked women.

Competition must be fierce. Why pay for a copy of a magazine, with some 45 glossy pages of girls, when you can find thousands of pages of porn on the Internet? I am utterly confused and baffled that the market still exists, especially while people never seem to buy the things. But by my same logic newspapers would no longer be around, and that clearly isn't the case. And books are doing alright too, even though most classic works or works in the public domain are now unabridged on the net. It seems like dead-tree technology still has some kicks left, afterall.

Papyrus lasted a darn long time. And so did carving on stones. The two existed simultaneously for about a thousand years, give or take. Each had things to recommend itself, stone was permanent, papyrus convenient. Books and paper? Permanent and convenient. Problem solved. Internet? Permanent, convenient and unlimited. Curses, foiled again!

I assume a time will come when the Internet has to struggle to keep up with some new technoloy that makes it outmoded. They asy the net is going through a '2.0' period, and radically being reclaimed and rewritten by us. Perhaps. Initially the net was for the tech savvy, just like the printing press was just for those with serious mullah and clout. By the middle of the 20th century anyone could print anything. Of course, not everyone would buy it, but it was out there, in second-hand bookstores and libraries around the nation. And, quite honestly, the century before was probably the most literary. That was when the printing boom began, and there weren't movies and television (or Internet) to otherwise distract.

Many of the authors we herald from that century wrote for newspapers, though. HG Wells, Dickens, Twain, all of them were common serial writers. Because back then newspapers were like the net today: convenient and unlimited. Anyone willing to spare a dime could hear about Phineas Fogg's adventures, of a chapter of Dickens. Anyone willing to cough up for a computer can follow any number of stories on the Internet, details of pathos, profound insights, and incredible adventures.

Of course we're not doing that. We're reading jokes and looking at porn. But, you know, the thought counts. That's why I keeping posting these, afterall.