The relationship between pornography and technology has long been debated. Some advocate that it is pornography that drives innovation through the unwavering power of human lust, while others insist it is technology that inspires pornography, which is often all-too-willing. While the truth likely lies in both of these statements, the insatiable desire for pornography has had very clear influences on many technological advances.

While not all of its experiments with new technologies have been successful, the majority of porn’s ventures were. As long as humans have had the ability to draw and write, we have been crafting erotic art across all mediums at our disposal. However, it is only relatively recently that the ability presented itself to produce such erotic works in bulk, which has led to the rise of the modern day porn industry.

Prior to the existence of the printing press, producing erotic works was expensive and time consuming, as each one had to be handmade. Along with the printing press arose the ability to mass produce, and of course pornography then became hugely common. Lithography, invented in 1796, is a printing method that applies an oil image on a stone or metal plate onto another surface. This invention quickly followed the way of the printing press as people realised the potential of another cheap and quick method for producing pornographic materials. Yet, the ability of pornography to drive, and not just adopt, technology was not yet obvious.

To see the beginnings of modern pornography and its influence on technology, let us fast forward to the invention of the modern camera. Unlike their clunky counterparts of the late 1800s, cameras in the mid-twentieth century became all about accessibility. They prided themselves on their instant qualities and ability to cut out the middle man when producing film.

Naturally, this was a field day for amateurs - suddenly, anyone with a camera and an interest could easily make their own pornographic content! Camera companies, realising the more deviant applications of their instant film, produced not-so-subtle advertisements such as the one pictured below. The wholehearted adoption of the production and/or commercialisation of amateur videos, coupled with the next technology on the list, eventually led to advances made in bandwidth for the early internet.

Kodak advertisement - June 1971 Playboy magazine

Appealing to the same creativity and freedom was provided by personal cameras, the next technology pornography adopted was the recordable home video. This technological change eventually lead to the video format wars of the seventies. The rise of amateur videos from this time period is a trend still reflected in today’s popular porn genres, where anyone can be a star of their own videos. Also, and interestingly enough, it is the wide adoption of VHS as the format for these pornographic videos that led to the eventual death of Betamax (Greenberg, J.M. From BetaMax to Blockbuster Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. MIT, 2008)

The next development was closed captions. Thanks to the societal taboo on porn - which did not decrease the cravings for it - closed captions were popularised through pornography as a way to keep personal entertainment choices, well, personal. That’s right, it’s the secretive viewing of porn that led to the invention of closed captions, which are now used commonly to aid deaf watchers and by viewers of foreign films.

Despite the media advances, new technologies in print did not die just yet — Playboy magazine started being published in Braille in the 1970s. Pornographic content was previously produced by Braille typewriters. The demand for pornography helped popularize the Braille embosser, and this momentum has carried into the future, to the point of there being discussion around the publishing of Braille e-books.

The second great game-changing wave of pornography following was the internet. Pornography became the second driving force behind the military in the investment in internet technology. Arpanet, the progenitor of the modern day internet, was developed by the United States Department for Defense, and was first established in 1969. The early internet was mainly for connecting research institutions and government branches. However, soon people realised the ability to share content and images for entertainment, and by the time the Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs, took off in the late eighties, the internet was primed for porn. A sys-op named Bob Mahoney built his Exec-PC BBS into a $2 million dollar a year business by 1993, with more than 30,000 subscribers worldwide. Said the Exec-PC CEO, “We really didn’t advertise the adult materials. The word just got around pretty quickly. One of our main claims to fame was that we had—to my knowledge—the largest collection of adult materials anywhere.”

Thanks to the popularity of home cameras and sex tapes, bandwidth for the internet was increased to share this content. In the early days of the internet, four or five out of the top ten web searches would be for porn (Dan Ackman, “How big is porn?” Forbes, May 25, 2001). People began creating their own websites and offering online services, while others wanted to pay for those services in a secure and confidential manner. These entrepreneurs became early adopters of online payments, convincing businesses that real money could be made from online content, thus making pornography the first industry to adopt online payments and inspire the rest of the world to use them too.

Glance marketing from their website

Where are we today? What new advances is pornography eyeing to make its own? High resolution erotic images and videos pushed bandwidth limits in the early internet days, and there is some evidence to show that pornography will inspire similar innovation in the world of Virtual Reality. Even Google Glass - despite being no longer commercially available - had a pornographic application called Glance developed for it, which promises to allow the user to view the world from a second user’s perspective.

And with video quality also improving, 3D pornographic films have become another possibility. The first major case of using 3D technology in shooting pornographic films occurred in 2011, in Hong Kong, and it’s likely the industry has found a niche somewhere for it since then (McIntyre, S., & Pomfret, J. “Hong Kong film hopes to break new ground with 3-D porn.” Reuters 16 August 2010).

With visual stimulation reaching new heights, the sense of touch can feel sorely neglected by technology. Not anymore, with the emergence of haptic feedback.

Haptic feedback - technology in which forces, vibrations or motions that help recreate the sense of touch - has applications in improving telepresence, in adding new dimensions to videogame interactivity, or even in medicine. Whether providing a “sense-track” to go with a video or simulation, or enhancing interactions between a camgirl and a client, biofeedback can prove to be everyone’s new best friend, as well as the way of the future for all communications, including non-sexual ones.

Kissing Device by the Kajimoto Laboratory, Tokyo

With devices such as the RealTouch already in service and in use for sexual purposes, there are also those that are developing technology which has clear pornographic applications yet is still in innocent development - such as a Japanese interactive kissing device.

That’s right, a kissing device. Known as the “Kiss Transmission Device,” it is being developed in Tokyo, by the Kajimoto Laboratory at The University of Electro-Communications. Obviously, there is a future in this for pornography as well and not just long-distance relationship upkeep.

One of the more creative possible uses pornography could make of technology lies in drones. While the current existing evidence of drone use in pornographic film is still mainly limited to a particular artistic film - which, according to its creator Brandon LaGanke, “the idea started out as a light-hearted riff on surveillance culture and privacy. The plan was to take beautiful landscapes, and just put people fucking in them.” Drones have even popped up in popular entertainment. In episode five of season eighteen of the adult animated sitcom, South Park, everyone in the neighborhood possesses a personal drone. While various serious roles are presented for the drones such as use in neighborhood security or by the police, these drones are instead used mainly to spy on other neighbors and their sex lives. It seems inevitable that the pornographic industry will find a use for even drones, if at the very least as a novel camera angle for the exhibitionist genre.

By seeking to indulge the senses and creatively utilising the latest technologies of the day, pornography has in turn, brought many innovations into the sphere of everyday life. Countless technologies throughout the years have easily lended themselves to pornography, but in their heyday, perhaps also may have seemed as odd as drones, or as natural as virtual realities. If necessity is the mother of invention, then lust is the sister of innovation. After all, lust is a very powerful desire, powerful enough even to force strange, new technologies into the realm of the common usage.