Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1 Netporn Browsing in Small Places and Other Spaces Chapter 3 2 Post or Perish: The New Media Schooling of the Amateur Pornographer Chapter 4 3 Porn Arousal and Gender Morphing in the Twilight Zone Chapter 5 4 Eros in Times of War: From Cross-Cultural Teasings to the Titillation of Torture Chapter 6 5 Post-Revolutionary Glimpses and Radical Silence: Netporn in Hong Kong and Mainland China Chapter 7 Conclusion
Katrien Jacobs is assistant professor in new media at City University of Hong Kong. She has lectured widely on gender, sexuality, new media art, globalization, and censorship. She is the author of Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art.
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.
*Chuck Kleinhans, Northwestern University; co-editor, Jump Cut: A
Review of Contemporary Media*
Pornography drives new technologies. Avant-garde porn enthusiasts
and producers have a passion to learn about Webcams, video
streaming, blogs, and peer-to-peer file exchanges. Katrien Jacobs
is one such pioneer who takes the reader on a journey into the
world of Internet porn. Jacobs provides cutting-edge scholarship on
understudied cyber-subcultures that have grown up around the
sharing of sexually explicit materials as she models a new type of
cultural research for the digital age. It should be read by all
those interested in the questions surrounding the intersection of
technology, identity, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
and cyber-culture. The sections on warporn and Abu Ghraib and on
the netporn "blogolution" in greater China are two highlights.
Jacobs clearly shows that sex and the digital revolution go far
beyond Euro-American networks.
*Gina Marchetti, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature,
University of Hong Kong*
In resistance to the restrictive economy of the state and capital,
as well as the rigid and globalizing nation-state surveillance Web,
net porn practitioners in Jacobs's study are not only swapping porn
and exchanging juicy scenes, but also staging pleasurable even
sublime experiences through creating disorderly tastes and desires
that enact the exuberance and ecstasy of our culture. As such,
Netporn constitutes a powerful and timely intervention into the
infringing and criminalizing power of the growing exclusive society
as well as the regulatory state.
*Josephine Ho, National Central University*
Jacobs's alluring book turns up the heat on media theory in its
analysis of the world of Internet pornography. It represents the
complex world of producing and consuming Internet pornography as a
critical space of subcultural sexual experiments, and in so doing,
compels us to experience the morphing patterns of arousal, at both
the intellectual and bodily levels. Netporn is a serious academic
achievement, even as it offers us a sweet temptation.
*John Nguyet Erni, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; author, Unstable
Frontiers: Technomedicine And the Cultural Politics of Curing AIDS*
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