Chaos and Control: the Janus Face of the Commercial Online Pornography Industry

Jennifer Johnson

Transcript

October 3, 2014

Chaos and Control: The Janus Face of the Commercial Online Pornography Industry

So as I was listening to Cordelia and Don, I thought, oh, what a perfect order. I do not know if this was intended, because Cordelia talked about toxic decisions in a toxic environment, and Don talked about how that toxicity gets inside of us and changes the way in which we function neurologically, changes the way in which we see ourselves and our emotions. And my job is to basically tell you where that toxic environment comes from. Who creates that toxic environment and for what purpose. And I can tell you the answer is pretty easy. It is the industry and it is done for money. That my job is to help, as Don was saying, change the discussion. That we are not really dealing here with a moral issue, a religious issue, or an ideological issue. We are dealing with an industry and an economic issue and the way in which an industry uses and understands human behavior to market and manipulate consumers. And my work really focuses on the industry from the consumptive point of view, not necessarily the images. I do not do image analysis, this is not about understanding what the images are. It is about understanding how the industry functions and markets it product to consumers. It is fundamentally an economic analysis. Because this is fundamentally about money. And we know this. We know this when we look at pornography. We know it when we see what is going on on the web. That the web has fundamentally changed the world of pornography. No longer are we dealing with magazines that are hidden in basements. I remember that was my first contact with pornography. We moved into a new house and I found this very thick oddly distorted book from water hidden in our basement in the corner, right, it was left there from the people who lived there before. We are not dealing with that world anymore. We are dealing with a world where pornography is affordable, accessible, and anonymous. That we can get it routinely, it is very easy to get it, and there is a lot of it out there. And my work thinks that how is that work produced and distributed. We have there has been a forty thousand fold increase in the number of web pages. About six point two billion webpages are indexed by Google. And the most conservative estimate, the most conservative estimate, is that about four percent of those are pornography. And that is from A Billion Wicked Thoughts, that was cited by Cordelia. Which equals about two hundred and forty eight million pornographic websites. Now granted it is very difficult to get accurate numbers on this, and this is a large part of the debate about pornography is finding and understanding empirical evidence about the size and the scope is very difficult because it is a very dynamic and ever changing environment. And what constitutes or how do you search engines are different and they produce different results. So I use a conservative estimate and say two hundred and forty eight million pornographic websites. And this size and scope, the changing size and scope, of pornography has produced a very difficult debate in feminist circles. And they it has created a false dichotomy between pro pornography and those who are anti pornography. And the debate can be simplified like this. The pro pornography, people who are pro pornography see the Internet as a field of choice. That it has opened new doors for exploration, diversity, and free choice. That is you describe it as a democratized system. The idea is that anybody and everybody can now participate in pornography, can produce their own pornography. Because it is open and democratized, it has been described as a thousand cyber sex flowers blooming, exploring and tinkering to create new services, technologies, and organizational forums. That this is a whole new economic system where you the consumers and the producers are no longer controlled by capitalist systems or narrow systems of sexuality. That we can explore and express on our own. And that is generally supported or argued by the people who are pro pornography. That they argue that this is about female sexual empowerment. That women can find and control their sexuality through the Internet. That it opens the door for female sexuality. Those who are anti porn argue that the Internet is simply the same boss as the old boss. A new boss same as the old boss. That it is opened the door pathways for reproducing current capitalistic power structures. That it has made basically the same thing only on a bigger scale. And that pornography is now about consolidation and control. And these are questions about how the industry itself functions. Is pornography on the Internet chaotic, open, disparate? Or is pornography on the Internet the same as you would see for example when you go into the grocery store? When we go into the grocery store it feels like you have a lot of different choices, but do we know how many corporations control your grocery store? Does anybody know how many? About five, right. So when you spend the money in the grocery store, most of it goes into the pockets of basically five different corporations. This is the anti porn argument, is that you feel you go out on the Internet you may feel there is tons of choices. You go into the grocery store and you feel there is tons of choices. But basically it is about centers of power. My question is this. Does online pornography chart new exploration… [sound lost] and chart new sexual pathways for sexual exploration and sexual empowerment? Or does it simply reproduce current economic structures. Ok. And this is fundamentally about a question of the Internet. How does the Internet function? Because we are no longer talking about magazines. We are no longer talking about traditional publishing. We are talking about how does sexuality play out on the Internet. And so research on the structure of the Internet is some of the landmark research is by Albert Barabasi. And what Albert Barabasi has found is that the structure of the Internet itself is not random. It is not open. It is what is called scale free. I got to get my little pointer here, where is my pointer. Here is what a scale free network looks like and this is a little deep here but I am going to work you through it. So scale free networks are centralized and controlled by dominant hubs, versus random networks. So you will see the one on the right is a random network. There is no centralized structure, that every node has different types of connections, and in a random network, every node has different levels of or has basically the same change of being clicked on. Versus a scale free network. A scale free network is on the right. And a scale free network is a network that is centralized and controlled by a few dominant hubs. You know this intuitively, right? You know when you go to the Internet, where do you go? Where is the first place you go? Facebook, right? Where else do we go? Google, right? Where else may we go? Email, right? Amazon. These are hubs in the network and what Barabasi found in mapping the structure of the Internet is that the Internet is not a random open network. The Internet is a scale free network. Meaning it is dominated by hub structures, meaning certain websites dominate and control the flow of the network. And so most people on the Internet most of the Internet is controlled controls most of the flow, I am trying to get this down here. That the flow of the Internet is controlled by various central hubs. Google, Yahoo, Facebook. Most of the traffic goes through those nodes. They control those nodes and the flow of the traffic. And if you imagine if Google was down or Facebook was down. How much of the Internet would be affected if those went down? A lot, right? That is how you know what a scale free network is. When one node can control the flow of the network. So what Barabasi found was that the Internet itself functions through a power law. Meaning that twenty percent of the nodes control eighty percent of the links. When you look at the network those first nodes, twenty percent of the websites control and own eighty percent of the links on the Internet. It is dominated by hubs and others have confirmed this. And we can see, this is a current map, of the Internet today. Come on, come on. Is it going to come? Oh no, ok. Well if we could see that pretty picture, it would show you that exact thing. Oh there it is, ah. So this is what the Internet looks like today. What do we see? These nodes are sized, the dots on there are sized by the number of links that go to that node. What do we see? Do we see hubs? Do we see some nodes dominate the network? You know this intuitively. This is a scale free network. All right let me get back. And when we look at scale free networks, what we see, here is some examples. We see scale free networks all over the place. We see scale free networks in molecules, actors function in scale free networks..…[Sound lost]. That is a scale free network game, meaning that Kevin Bacon can be connected. He is a hub. Internet routers, we see it in research collaborations. Sexual relationships. So the CDC and others trace sexually transmitted diseases through scale free networks. They can look for and find those. And what we see, whoops, is that this pattern is found in most large networks. Now this is think about what this is saying. This is a pattern of large networks. This is not a particularly idiosyncratic pattern. It is how large networks function. How large again is the pornography industry conservatively? Two hundred and forty eight million websites. Is that a large network? Yes that is a large network. So here is my question. Does pornography follow this pattern? Which would the argument democratic experience. Or is pornography is it an exception to the power law rule? Is the pornography industry something so different entirely that it does not follow the power law rule or the pattern of most other large networks. And this is what I sought to map and measure. So I come to this from a very circuitous route. As I said to Cordelia last night, I did not come to the question of pornography through a particular moral standing or even a real interest in researching pornography. I came to this through a methodology that I worked for about three years at the Department of Defense mapping and measuring terrorist networks using this social network analysis. When I returned to academia which is where my heart is, right I was not cut out for the DOD on that. I brought with me this methodology of social network analysis. Now I have always been a feminist interested in gender, gender theory, and womens lives. And I think it was about 2006 I met Doctor Gail Dines. And Doctor Gail Dines was doing her presentation…[sound lost] she talks about how there is a connection between pornography and mainstream industry but nobody really had the tools to figure out these connections. And of course what did I say, I have this cool tool that I learned at the Department of Defense, and I think it could apply. That was seven years ago and [sound lost] had application of social network analysis. This is not social networking, that is Facebook. This is social network analysis which is a quantitative methodology that uses mathematical algorithms to map and measure patterns in networks. It focuses on links and nodes. Links are the ties between two nodes are the same. It could be a computer, it could be a person, it could be a country. A node can be anything. In this instance nodes are pornography businesses and the links between them are when they get together to do business. If they are sharing videos, if they are doing business together for marketing. But it is I will use these terms nodes and links. However it is a fundamentally descriptive methodology. It is not statistically based. It is simply used to describe how systems function. And so in 2007 after I met Gail, I worked with a group of students to collect data, and this took us a year to collect because we had to hand collect the stories. Don mentioned XBIZ. Basically XBIZ is the marketing arm or the industry magazine for the pornography industry. So it reports on what is going on in the industry. It talks about who is in, who is out, what are people doing. And one of its sections is a little blurb. And they post several blurbs a day that look something like this. The Hustler live chat network owned by Larry Flint…[sound lost] Flirt for Free, Playboy Live, Falcon Live, Homegrown Cams, and video secrets in the video secrets affiliate program. I am going to talk to you more about these affiliate programs. And so what my students and I did was that we basically created a connection between Hustler and Flirt for Free, Hustler and Playboy, Hustler and Falcon, Hustler and Homegrown Cams. As well as Homegrown Cams and Flirt for Free, Homegrown Cams and Playboy Live. So those were the connections that we hand coded. So we would see we also looked at Yahoo business, although this did not have very much information in it because most of the pornography industry is privately housed so that they do not have public business reports. So it is very difficult to get an exact read on what they are doing. But Yahoo Business had some information in it. So again WAAT media, the worlds largest provider of late night entertainment for mobile announced today that that it was partnered with Vantrix. So it created a connection between Vantrix and WAAT media. The different type we harvested links from both ABN and XBIZ which are both their industry sites and we then took those harvested we put those links that we hand coded into free harvester. And what the harvester did was the harvester went into those websites and scraped out other connections on those websites. Does that make sense? So we started first by hand coding things like these. We then took the links that we got and we fit them into a scraper, it is called. And the scraper goes to those website that we hand coded and then we scraped out all the links on that website. That make sense? So there was two rounds on that. We got five thousand four hundred and thirty lines of code. The links were various links were marketing insideries, website launch and development, production, distribution agreements. And the results were the largest connected component. Now when we say largest connected component, what we mean is the biggest group of nodes that were connected to one another, as opposed to little onesie twosie. Two thousand one hundred eighty five nodes. About twenty eight hundred edges. Meaning it was a very sparse network. Only about point 00 three percent of all possible ties were present, and you are going to see what that looks like here in a minute. They were mostly pornography industries, so most of them were eighty nine percent were those that were overtly pornography businesses. Although there was about eleven percent of them were mainstream non pornography industry things, including actually Nickelodeon is in here as well. What we found is that they were very dependent upon mainstream technology. So this is what it looked like. What do we see? Now think back to the question of scale free versus random. Remember a random network is one that is open, democratic, where all nodes have kind of roughly equal shots of being clicked on…[sound lost] versus a scale free network which is a hub network, tightly controlled. What do we see here? You see random or hub? Hub, right? That in 2007 at least based on this limited round of data collection we start to see this hub structure. That it has centers of power. Hubs surrounded by a loose periphery. What we then did was went through hand hand coded all of these two thousand four hundred and some sites to try to figure out what are they doing in the network? What is their role in the network? And so you can see here, I do not know if you can read this, but I will give you a kind of highlight. The red circles that you see there, those are consumer websites, so those are the website that consumers go to find and buy pornography. ..[sound lost]. We will get closeups here in a minute, these are affiliate websites. Affiliate websites are the business centers of the pornography industry, and you can go down to conglomerates, producers, distributors, financial forums, and mainstream. So we have about, what, eight colors up there. What do you see here? Do you see any patterns? Not really, right? Lots of different colors in lots of different places. Because this is how it feels when you interface the pornography industry as a consumer.