The advantage to that, of course, is the exposure it affords, and after the merely modest success of his debut solo album, Continuation, Bailey needed the reflected glory. On the other band, it's hard to shine yourself in such a glare, and although Bailey's name was on the gold-selling hit single "Easy Lover," a duet with Collins that helped the album take off, it's Collins' singing and drumming that one remembers.

Elsewhere, tunes like "Photogenic Memory" and "Walking On The Chinese Wall" better represent Bailey's ability to handle a variety of material from ballads to techno dance tracks with his elastic falsetto. Still, Chinese Wall was a gold-selling standoff that made Bailey a solo hitmaker without really establishing him on his own.

Listen to over 70 million songs with an unlimited streaming plan. Listen to this album and more than 70 million songs with your unlimited streaming plans. Arif Mardin, Arranger - D. Clarke, Composer. Ballard, Composer - P. Sharron, Composer. Arif Mardin, Arranger - M. Johnson, Composer. Littman, Composer. Arif Mardin, Arranger - E. Self-representation visual as well as verbal becomes pornographic because of the address the representation carries and the responses it elicits from the consumers of the representation.

The pay off moment in netporn is not in the physical or-. This disembodiment of pornography and its severe wrenching from the notions of body is definitely a unique characteristic of cyberspatial pornography. Let us start by defining a blog. Traditionally, in a conception that seems to think of cyberspace as an extension of the real world; a space of fantasy and escape, blogs have been looked upon as an evolution of personal diaries or personal publications.

It is easy to define blog as a web-publishing tool, thus spiralling an immense amount of speculation, discussion and critique of blogs as replacing the traditional news media and bringing out subversive narratives that shall change the world.

However, this conception of blogs comes from a techno-utopic idea and has been redundant for some time. While it is indeed a valid argument that the documented visibility of non-mainstream and marginal voices leads to a certain impact on the way information and knowledge production are treated, this is not the structural motif of blogging.

Instead of looking upon blog as a medium of communication and information dissemination, it might actually help in treating it as a cultural artefact. A cultural artefact, to avoid any confusion, can be clearly defined as a living repository of shared meanings produced by a community of ideas. A cultural artefact is a symbol of communal in the non-violent, non-religious sense of the word belonging and possession.

A cultural artefact becomes infinitely mutable and generates many self-referencing and mutually defining narratives rather than creating a master linear narrative. Because the cultural artefact is beyond the purview of the law and becomes a signage for the construction of the Symbolic Order within a community, it carries an illegitimate authority, which is not sanctioned by the legal systems or the State, but by the lived practices of the people who create it. If looked upon as cultural artefacts, blogs can reveal different ideas as to why people blog and what are the motifs of the cyberspace medium that they inherit.

I would suggest that blogs be looked upon as structured around the idea of Hypervisualisation. Hypervisualisation can be detected in the Disney and Pixar animated movies where the aesthetic of the movie is not in the narrative structure but in the rendering visible of that which was not previously available to a normative eye.

It is easy to confuse Hypervisualisation with Realism, but a close look at the techniques reveals that Hypervisualisation is actually almost the reverse process of Realism.

While Realism sought to represent reality, Hypervisualisation seeks to substitute it with a higher and more believable notion of the real.

Apart from the penetrative gaze that it. Hypervisualisation is the characteristic motif of interactive cyberspaces wherein it becomes a trope for revealing. Most studies of blogging seem to concentrate on what they call political blogs or information blogs that have a large audience and are more visible.

However, we need to look upon blogging, not as being inspired by these promises of reportage or analyses, but as driven by the innate desire to tell a story, and a story not of the other, but largely of the self. A large section of the blogosphere consists of personal blogs biographical narratives documenting the ephemeral experience of living every day. At the cost of sounding lyrical, I would suggest that blogs are an attempt to achieve immortality to create documents that shall outlive the user and live in the limbo of the virtual.

It is the same drive that perhaps drives an artist to use blood in her paintings on canvas, or a writer to put his angst to paper. The visible face of blogging the informative blogs and the meta-blogs that analyse the blogs are actually exceptions rather than the rule. They are visible because they are rare and it would be a mistake to look upon these blogs as representative of the blogosphere.

They need to be evaluated as subversive rather than allied to the nature of blogging. This is the reason why I look upon the blogging community within Livejournal rather than looking at the more celebrated blogs that have a large readership and are looked upon as objective representations.

I would rather focus on blogs that tell the story. In the methods of telling this story, and the kind of things this story telling enables, I shall try to formulate the notion of netporn as we have conceived it so far.

A typical life cycle of a blogger on ElJay as it is often known amongst the more prolific bloggers on Livejournal is interesting. This is what I call the foreplay of blogging. As the bloggers start befriending people and increase their audience and readership, a strange thing happens. Instead of suddenly becoming more cautious of the self and the things that are being revealed on the blog, the blogger increasingly sheds the layers of pseudonymity and facades that they create in their early narratives.

There is a typical increase in talking of the self in these narratives, and one can notice a sharp shift from the exploratory narratives to the intimate revelatory biographies that are produced in the blogs.

However, more than the content of the blog, it is the nature of conversation that they encourage and the element of the personal that comes out in the conversation. Flirting, talking dirty, using sexual innuendoes, putting intimate pictures of the self, or even inventing sexually charged blogging language like comment whore or blog virgin are a part and parcel of this stripping. The narratives of the self take on the overpowering temptation that the Internet offers of stripping the self bare without any inhibition of any kind.

These are the people for whom the filters dont work and the most intimate and personal feelings and descriptions are put forward. Advice, exchanges, sharing of emotions, bonding the process takes many different roads. It is the post third date scenario and things are going to hot up.

The content of the blog no longer matters. The blog often dwindles into something that is mundane, dull, everyday, regular, uniformly un-anecdotal and private. This moment when the blog content comes full circle and resembles the first posts, is the moment of blorgasm. The sense that the self has been realised and that the experience of the moment is captured in that one representation or conversation is the pinnacle of pleasure for a dedicated blogger.

The hypervisualised self becomes the naked self and this sense of rawness is evident in the way the blogs are written. They are no longer for a wide audience or the large readership that the blogger has accrued. The narratives are a form of exchange of sexual signs between the blogger and the adulterous group of close friends that the blogger has cultivated.

Often the comments take the form of an orgiastic setting so embedded in personal views, shared meanings and language that they make no sense to anybody else. If pornography is indeed a representation of an exchange of sexual signs in a post-Derridian world, then blogging falls under that pattern.

It also leads to an unsettling reverse embodiment which is perhaps unique to interactive cyberspaces. In the first half of their blogging cycle, most users try to map their known-imagined and aspired-for bodies in the virtual world, and look upon these bodies as an extension of their physical presence. In the post-blorgasm world, where the blogger suddenly becomes conscious of the disembodied body and makes a call for privatising the public, the disembodied self comes to be mapped upon the physical body of the user;.

The very act of blogging becomes pornographic in nature as it moves towards creating a certain ethos of sexual interchange and a coming of the self in the course of this interchange. The blog becomes a space of shared meaning where signals need to be decoded and signs get produced out of intimately shared meanings.

The blogs on ElJay, specifically the personal blogs, take on the form of pornography as they use the pornographic structure of interplay and represented pleasures of a disembodied spectator in their unfolding. The blog in fact becomes an illustration of netporn as I define it. Cyberspatial pornography needs to be tracked in interactive spaces like the blog where the self real or imaginary, physical or disembodied, consuming or consumed is put on display and reveals itself in progression, arriving at a stage where it realises itself through the conversations that take place in the blog.

There are thus two ways of understanding netporn: through the grid of experience, where the user is allowed to recognise the stripped naked self, and the realisation of the publicness of the self, where the virtual persona of the user is mapped out on the physical body of the user. The elements of performance and participation also need to be understood as encouraging the process of stripping the self that happens in such environments. Pornography has been the major motif of attraction for young and first time users of the Internet.

They recognise the pornographic potential of cyberspace and hence most users who come to cyberspaces looking for pornography also become producers of pornography in the interactive cyberspaces.

More than the legislating bodies or theorists, it is the users who have defined netporn in the interactive cyberspaces and have exploited them to escape the panoptical view of a blinkered State apparatus.

The geeks the power users of cyberspace, the virtual flneur who have constructed, explored, exploited and coined cybercities had this idea of pornography and the pleasure principle long before the cyberspace became a democratic space of GUIs and intuitive navigation.

Pr0n, geek slang for pornography of a different kind, was already in existence to give us clues to the pornographic nature of the Internet. In Geek lingo, pr0n has very little or nothing to do with sexuality, sexual act or nudity. It is about the pleasure of control, of manipulation, of knowledge and of penetrating through a system, not by breaking it but by knowing it inside out.

Pr0n is in the ultimate pleasure that arises out of interacting with and through a system towards a physical and virtual climax. The subversive element of Pr0n is not in defeating the system but in embracing it, immersing in it and in deploying it beyond the initial conceptions of the system.

The pornographic in blogging on Livejournal is not about getting heard but about practicing pornography without being detected by the machinations of the state. While the incidents like MSNs closing of its chat rooms and yahoos currently withdrawn personal room service are already hinting at their recognition of the pornographic nature of such platforms, the state remains impervious to such an understanding of netporn and clambers in the dark to arrive upon a policing of pornography on the Internet.

The IT law passed as late as understands Internet pornography in the old fashioned grids of production, circulation, distribution and consumption. Hence it is unable to deal with either the digital sexual material that circulates so easily, or the intensely subversive pornographic nature of interactive surfing that the users indulge in on the cyberspace.

This policing of cyberspace from an external body is an indication of the failure of the legal apparatus to understand, identify or account for the object under consideration in our case, Internet pornography.

The authority of policing has always been the privilege of the State and also one of the activities through which the State validates its existence. However, this authority is now displaced to governing post-geographical authorities that rule in the realm of the Internet.

The pathologisation of the cyberspace by the very bodies that create and govern cyberspaces needs to be taken into account. The decision to police and to promote certain interactive cyberspaces is not just an economic decision but also a recognition of these spaces as embedded in cybercultural practices of a certain kind.

It was my intention to recognise netporn not as something embedded in sexual representations, but as something formed by the sphere of interaction and networking that emerges out of the practice of blogging. The need to recognise netporn as constituted in these spaces was to look at the possibilities of resistance and subversion without getting caught in the debates of obscenity and morality that usually surround any discussions of pornography.

It is also interesting to note that netporn, thus understood, can be recognised as paraphernalia of the all-inclusive globalisation. It also lets us recognise that the resistance that the Internet meets in the names of obscenity and morality are actually misplaced and are geared towards protesting against the approach of globalisation in the third world.

As a last remark, such an understanding of netporn gives the notions of subversion or dissent a new idea, allowing us to bypass the often all-containing decisions of the Indian nation state where pornography, and its production, consumption or possession, is a crime.

It also hints at the shifting paradigms of authority and power as bodies more powerful and pervasive than the geographically restricted nation state emerge and become the new policing and governing bodies in a world defined, understood and consumed through the deployment of cyberspatial technologies. Coca-cola, the worlds largest cola drink, was available in India till the s and was emblematic of a certain Western modernity and urbanism in Indian cinema and art.

However, following the closed market policy, Coca-cola disappeared from the Indian markets, only to make a reappearance after almost thirty years when the Indian economy adopted the free market structure. Coke once again became the brand that skipped a generation to arrive as the new sign of modernity and progress. The reappearance of Coke in the Indian markets was a sign of a new way of living and critiques of the States economic policies and globalisation have often revolved around this particular phenomenon.

Globalisation has changed the way we live, we work, we think of property and we create narratives of our self. It is one of the most visible paradigm shifts in the last century.

In a recent discussion in the Indian parliament about the access to pornography in public spaces, the concerned minister declared that they are encouraging cybercafs to do away with private cubicles and display panels, thus not giving privacy to the users. The clip spread like a contagion among the cellphone users around the nation and hit headlines. Here again is an example of the laws inability to understand a cultural form so that the producers of the material run free, but the consumer of the material is found guilty.

This is a definite example of disavowal on the part of the state, where instead of policing technology, it polices the consumption of technological forms. Instead of uploading material on a home page on some server, the P2P allows the users to share files and folders unsupervised on the hard drive of their computers and transfer them across Internet connections.

P2P was also the biggest forerunner in encouraging piracy of media on the Internet. Multiple User Dungeons or Multiple User Domains are text-based virtual reality platforms where players interact through massive role-playing and characterisation, investing a lot of time and text in creating the contexts and environments for their interactions.

Very few studies of pornography on the Internet have actually focused on the physical moorings of cyberspace. Jane Gaines is a rarity who, in her productive article Machines that Make the Body Do Things, looks upon the arrival of electric vibrators more popularly known on the net as dildos as an indicator of the relocation of the female clitoris and its gratification; something that heterosexual porn had blind-sighted in order to focus on the pay off moment the sperm of the male orgasm spattered all over the body of the female performer.

This was perhaps one of the first indicators of how netporn is not located in the material available on the net, but in the way the users deploy the technology in their interactions with each other. These interactions are threefold: human to human, human to machine, and machine to human. In his study of the infant Jesus iconography Childhood, Chris Jenks explores the objectification of the child for a particular gaze; religious, in this instance, as the beginnings of child pornography and the constitution of the child as an object of pornographic interest.

Jenks tries to make a claim that pornography is not constituted within the content but in the framing of the subject. With film studies and especially porn studies, this is an argument that has often been made. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his forthcoming book, talks of Realism in Indian cinema as pornographic in nature and looks at the world-renowned films of Satyajit Ray and Dada Saheb Phalke to make a case for cinematic pornography.

It is hardly surprising that the only pornography that is objectionable in the USA child pornography is presented as the reason for MSN and yahoos discontinuation of their chat rooms. One of the biggest advantages of using Livejournal for a sample is the unique community features that Livejournal offers by which people of different tastes, preferences and geographical locations can come together to network and interact.

Anna Nataro, in her forthcoming book provisionally titled Introduction to the Blogosphere, makes a strong argument for blogging as a Habermasian public sphere. However, such an argument is valid only for blogs that are obviously con-.

It would be misleading to say that blogs are primarily public in the Habermasian sense of the word. This setting of the Hypervisual against the Realist is an interesting juxtaposition.

It allows us to look at Hypervisualisation as the overthrow of the cinematic ethos of Realism and the introduction of a new way of looking at the world around us. Linda Williams, in her work Hard Core, provides an illuminating account of how the pathologisation and clinical framework of approaching pornography is actually a way of controlling and shaping female desire and sexuality.

Williams is bent on talking of pornography as that which renders the invisible visible, thus relocating the invisible in the domain of consumables and approachable. Though Williams doesnt use the term Hypervisualisation, it is on this simple understanding of make it visible that she bases her argument. Within blogging, especially within the blogosphere of Livejournal, Hypervisualisation can be observed and studied in the interactive memetic behaviour across the blogs and user groups.

Memes, generally identified as a bundle of data that gets transferred from one agent on to another, come in many forms and a liberal definition of memes would identify computer viruses, computer generated quizzes and results, chain letters and emails as memetic behaviour. My focus is more on memes with two active agents participating in the transfer. Also, Livejournal, because of its interactive space encourages memetic behaviour and thus offers a strong connection between narrativisation and memeisation.

A power blogger for more than six years now, Min Jung MJ at www. However, my model moves away from his a little and is more typical of a user on ElJay. In an extremely provocative article: Bloggers need not apply, available at www. In fact, Ivan goes ahead to warn prospective and current bloggers to make the same mistake of revealing too much about themselves.

Ivans warnings have a practical tone to them, but he too recognises the discomfort that comes from activities like blogging or other interactive cyberspaces. Paul Willemen, in his aspirations for a Pornoscape, draws a close link between the knowledge and the experience of sexuality. Drawing from the parable of the Original Sin and tracing it to the claims of authenticity that are produced through experience of sexuality, Willemen brings to the fore the power equations that revolve around the construction of sexuality and the pathologisation of it through an uninformed critique of pornography.

The blogger, in the blorgasmic moment bridges the gap between experience and knowledge. The first cycle of blogging is experiential, and the knowledge of that experience feeds the second part of the cycle.

Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in the electronic form any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend of deprave or corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all.

Foucault, M. Gaines, J. Gibson, London, BFI, pp Ghai, S. Director , Khalnayak, Mukta Arts Productions, Gibson, W. Jenks, C. Nair, M. Nataro, A. Introduction to the Blogosphere, forthcoming. Rajadhyaksha, A. Reid, E. Turkle, S. Williams, L. Willemen, P. Gibson, London: BFI, pp Sex work may be the worlds oldest profession, but the word profession until recently, has been only vaguely applicable to this line of work.

Its perhaps more accurate though less snappy to say that sex workers1 are the worlds oldest unregulated working population. But for a profession that can stake such a historical claim, the industry is extremely adaptable and workers have been quick to pursue opportunities provided by the Internet as they arose and continue to change, including but not limited to online porn.

Though the porn performers I wrote about in the last chapter, as well as the cam girls in the first chapter, certainly qualify as sex workers, the Internet provides women whose sex work is conducted in person, especially escorts, with new opportunities for advertising, screening clients, and building community with one another. Because of the shame of societal disapproval and the logistics around the legal repercussions inherent in this line of work, advertising, safety, and access to community are immense challenges to people who work in the sex industry.

Over the last dozen or so years, the Internet has allowed for a massive shift as far as access goes, and the sex industry has therefore become more accessible to would-be workers and clients. The sex industry has also simultaneously become more private and more exposed, more professional and more of an identifiable culture. The culture of shame around the industry is very much alive in some respects; however, for many women, shame is being chased out as more and more current and former sex workers out themselves in the media beyond the Internet.

The most obvious example of this outing is in the ways porn stars are obsessed over by mainstream media. Sex worker chic is spreading like wildfire. In certain ways, this is nothing new: Xaviera Hollander, internationally known as the happy hooker after her. Since then, porn stars, strippers, and high-class call girls have leapt into the mainstream spotlight through sex scandals and tell-all memoirs. For the sex workers themselves, this popularity is not dissimilar to the shiny red apple with a razor lodged inside: As trendy and appealing as sex work can seem to be, the profession is still rife with stigma and many inherent risks.

The possibilities of the Internet for sex workers lead to a kind of chooseyour-own-adventure negotiation with notoriety and secrecy, where a sex worker can easily become something of a celebrity both within her own community and outside of it if she puts in the effort. Though there are many different kinds of sex workers who use the Internet, including escorts, fetish workers, dommes, and strippers who use online forums for support, the bulk of this chapter focuses on middle-class escorts, the most rapidly growing and visible part of the industry mainly because of the ways the Internet has changed that particular aspect of sex work.

Sure, sex sells other stuff, but, they wondered, doesnt sex just sell itself? The truth is that a lot of deep marketing-thought goes into the sex industry, whether the entity being sold is an independent escorts companionship or couples porn. However, its true that marketing becomes tricky when theres no physical product, or when the service thats being provided isnt necessarily legal. Mainstream ad agencies deal with versions of this problem all the time as they market brands and lifestyles, but sex workers tangle with it in a different way, because the thing on the market block is them.

Advertising has always been the simplest for street workers, because what you see is what you getwith maybe a few minor and inevitable variations. However, for women who work in dungeons, brothels, and private apartments, or outcalls to hotels, advertising is a very precise art form requiring that they reach a perfect balance between adequately representing themselves so that the client is not disappointed and construing themselves in a way that attracts the kinds of clients they want to see.

For women who work independently, the Internet has opened up a vast new world of opportunity in which different marketing styles can be tried out cheaply and easilyand changed immediately if they fail. Its hardly an overstatement to say that the Internet has transformed the sex industry: the ways businesses are run, the stigmas attached to being on either side of the transaction, the visibility of the industry, and the information available about sex workers who market their services.

Many sex workers who worked in the industry before the Internet jumped right on board with Internet advertising as soon as they got a glimmer of the opportunities the web offered. In , Veronica Monet started working as an escort in Berkeley, California. She advertised in the Spectator, a major weekly adult tabloid at that time.

The paper was essentially a vehicle for sex workers ads, which were its major source of capital. Each ad, which typically took up a sixteenth of a page, consisted of a few lines of text, a sort of abstract photo that didnt show the womans face, and a phone number. For Monet and other independent sex workers of her era, small ads in the Spectator and he information provided, Monet received many more phone calls than she did clients. Oftentimes the potential client would reveal what kind of woman he was looking for and it wouldnt be a fit.

Agencies werent always helpful, and they were renowned for the bait and switch, in which a photograph or description of one woman is provided and then someone not matching that description at all appears for the job. Certainly the thrill of the unknown was part of the appeal for some clients, though for others the roadblocks to getting exactly what they wanted were numerous. Monet used the Spectator exclusively for the first two years of her career, until a technologically savvy client of hers gave her the heads-up about Bulletin Board Systems BBSes , an early, nonpublic form of the Internet.

After discovering the BBS, Monet continued to use print ads, but she began to give potential clients a password so they could log on to her little corner of the system. The men were able to check out pictures that gave them a much better sense of her than the newspaper ads.

Monet made the bold choice to show her face in the photographs she posted online, something almost unheard of at the time. By , Monet was fully exploring the options that the burgeoning Internet technology had to offer. They hosted sixty-four incoming lines and held forums on which people were able to discuss sex. Two Babes Online quickly became a go-to place for people of all stripes to explore their sexuality. But this site became more than just its message boards; it was an early incarnation of a porn site.

The images made available on the BBS were posted in many different formats, which meant that a porn consumer had to make some effort to get to know the technology of the system so he or she could sample the wares in order to get the instant gratification that these sites had the potential to provide. Slow-paced and roundabout not-so-instant gratification aside, the BBS proved to La Croix and her partner that there was money to be made from sex on the Internet.

After experiencing the sharp rise in popularity of Two Babes Online, La Croix began to explore the options for advertising offline services on the Internet. She had since become an escort, and decided that the Internet seemed like a good way to pursue clients. Located in Seattle, she was in close proximity to Microsoft. Her foresight that, in her words, Geeks need sex, too, or even more so led to a thriving business. Like Veronica Monet, she made the choice to show her face in the photographs she posted on her first website.

Though she hadnt shown her face in print advertisements before that point, La Croix had done an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, so she wasnt afraid of the level of exposure that might result from her postings. She saw showing her face as an. Today, face shots are commonplace among sex workers who advertise online. La Croix notes that the Internet fools people both sex workers and clients alike into thinking theyre anonymous.

In fact, she says, its quite the opposite. Feel free to leave one :. You will be redirected in 3 seconds. You are leaving x to a website that is not affiliated with us in any way. Old Young. HeyLittleDick SubbyHubby.

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