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Abstract
The Internet is optimistically regarded as a force for democracy and at the same time
another mechanism by which the poor and weak become further disempowered
(Calhoun, 1998). Computer mediated communication enhances the current power
structures while reinforcing the exploitation of those who are most vulnerable. By
recognising the dominance of online pornography, Internet Service Providers and the
communications industry are willing to accept the profits generated in working with
the porn industry while ignoring the price being paid by the most visible, and yet
voiceless agents. In doing so the Internet is awash with easily accessible pornographic
imagery with mobile phones viewed as an even bigger market. With the demand for
such material being the driving force for broadband usage and with the expansion of
the use of mobile phones for downloading videos, I will ask; ‘which United Kingdom
companies are the keyplayers? Are there structural holes within the networks,
ensuring ‘deniability’ for the larger industrial players?’ I target online websites of the
‘adult entertainment’ industry in the UK using HyperLink analysis in order to extract
the social network. This then enables me to conduct social network analysis
uncovering the keyplayers of the UK porn industry with higher levels of “closeness
centrality” and “betweenness centrality” (de Nooy et al., 2005). Closeness centrality
and betweenness centrality are regarded as measures of power within a given
network. This paper is an exploratory analysis of the dominant players shaping the
UK mobile porn industry, searching for tentative links between the providers and the
industrial players that have enabled the distribution of the material via the Internet and
mobile phones.
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Introduction
is either a product that gets you hooked on to another one or makes you just consume
more time on the net. After all, the goal of access people and telecoms is to have users
spend as much time on the net as possible, regardless of what they are doing. The
objective is to have you consume bandwidth. (Horvarth, 1998 cited in Terranova, 2004)
The paper is concerned with the mainstream space of flows of a highly commercial
activity on not just the Internet but mobile devices, the production and distribution of
pornography. The pornography industry is heavily reliant on the mainstream media
for the dissemination of their material. Where once the consumer of pornography had
to traverse a terrain that was policed, prohibited, regulated and hidden in the
periphery of spaces; now the consumption of digitised pornographic imagery is
achieved via fibre optic cable linked to personal computer terminals. With the advent
of portable video devices, from the 3G mobile phone to the iPod, this paper examines
the developing mainstream network of producers and distributors of pornography, its
limits and the next wave of distribution of pornography via ‘free stuff’ mobile sites or
“mini-porn” (Musgrove, 2005). This distribution takes place while the corporations
make assertions about their levels of social responsibility.
The United Kingdom (UK) Internet pornography industry is defined here as any adult
orientated website that is accessible to anyone online or via mobile phone, and the
businesses and companies that help or aid in the distribution of such content. It does
not cover newsgroups or peer-to-peer exchange of pornographic material. The
geographic location of this industry is not determined by the location of the servers
but by the business strategies employed by global pornographers in targeting the UK.
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industry without being seen to be associated with the production process and
exploitation that accompanies it (Devaney, 2002). In 2002 Penthouse was said to be
on the brink of bankruptcy (Devaney, 2002). The industry that was once dominated by
magazines has seen revenue drop and is fighting for survival. Their declining profits
made via the exploitation of women may be about to see a turn-around.
A survey conducted by the British ISP Homecall, found that 23 per cent of UK
residents are getting broadband in order to access pornography, and it is the most
important factor when getting broadband (Orlowski, 2004). The pornography industry
is important to the Internet because of its consumption of bandwidth (Zook, 2003).
Perdue (cited Zook, 2003) estimates that the pornography industry pays US $1.9
billion for bandwidth charges per annum. Developments in new media can be the best
thing to happen to old media (Orlowski, 2004).
Only twenty days after the launch of the video iPod on the 12th of October 2005, the
firm Apple announced that it had sold 1 million videos and television shows at $1.99
each. Podcasts can also be downloaded via Apples ITunes Music Store. According to
Bakker and Taalas (2007), within 24 hours of launching, 500,000 video clips were
downloaded from Suicidegirls website (suicidegirls.com) which offers short ‘adult’
movies. After 3 days, 1 million short movies had been downloaded from the website
(Kahney, 2005). The Sony created Playstation Portable, is also making pornographic
material available, although they describe the development as undesirable and insist
that it is the open source nature of Universal Media Discs (UMDs, an open source
format for digital movies). Niizumi believes the company has learned from the
Betamax and VHS debacle, “that adult-oriented movies can significantly affect the
expansion of a new media format” (Niizumi, 2005). Consequently, third generation
mobile phones (3G) are expected to contribute to the dissemination of pornographic
content and generate large revenues for the businesses concerned.
The claims of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by the industrial players needs to
be something other than hollow assertions of misguided virtue (Henderson, 2001).
It is the paramount duty of the Board of Directors to oversee the CEO and other
senior management in the competent and ethical operation of the Company on a
day-to-day basis and to assure that the long-term interests of the shareholders are
being served. To satisfy this duty, the directors will take a proactive, focused
approach to their position, and set standards to ensure that the Company is
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On the internet, pornography has been one of the few success stories in terms of
revenue generation. Pornography is increasingly becoming available on mobile around
the world. Can you afford to ignore mobile adult content?
[…]
Opinions on adult content will continue to differ, from person to person, from country
to country. Nevertheless there is no doubting that mobile adult content can reap
rewards for mobile operators, content producers, aggregators and distributors. There
are though a number of moral issues that must be taken in to account such as content
filtering and age verification. Laws and regulations in different countries are also
having an effect on what services can be offered. (Available at
http://www.visiongain.com/Report.aspx?rid=271 viewed 13/08/2008)
Bohman (2004) asserts that the hope that the Internet would replace sound-bite
television with an electronic democracy has failed. Sunstein and Shapiro (Cited
Bohman, 2004) argue that the Internet has undermined the sort of public sphere and
political interaction needed to engender genuine democratic deliberation.
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In adherence with Nadel (cited Cavanagh, 2007) the important factor is to not to
arbitrarily select a unit of analysis to study. The network is discovered through
empirical evidence rather than imposed by the researcher at the beginning. In this
instance I am allowing the network to be uncovered by the business industry report
rather than the process of HyperLink network analysis.
So what is a network? According to Cavanagh (2007) there are five core features of
social network analysis’s networks. Networks act to constrain the actions of
individuals, networks are in principle universal, networks do not affect the identity of
the individual components of them, networks are formed voluntarily but patterns
remain culturally specific, networks are not reducible to the aims of the actor involved
and social network analysis uses networks as a method of studying networks rather
than arguing “that they are a structure in their own right.”(Cavanagh, 2007:29)
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American Social Network Analysis on the other hand prefers to work with the concept
of the ‘network’ as a geographical metaphor instead of a structural metaphor.
Emphasis is placed on the communicative aspect of the network therefore seeing the
ties as facilitators and not constraints or boundaries. The communicative basis of the
network leads to the erosion of the distinction between organisational networks and
interpersonal ones (Scott, 2000:33-36). It is more concerned with ‘intensity’ and
‘strength’ not ‘reciprocity’ and ‘durability’. The focus is on a form of social capital
which facilitates action while at the same time arguing that individual components
retain their pre-existing identities (Cavanagh, 2007).
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interactive and generative mechanism of the network itself. The network according to
Actor-Network theory behaves as if it is a thing, a separate phenomenon from the
component parts that make it up. Actor-Network theory networks are not only
comprised of people and personal connections but also texts, objects and a diverse
array of material. The network as a whole, the materials, the nodes, the links, and the
images do not possess fixed properties so agency is a property of the initial goal that
resulted in the creation and formation of the network (Cavanagh, 2007:37).
Social network analysis seeks to trace the flow of information that passes through a
network of relations. Garrido and Halavais argue, “A map of the communication
network is roughly isomorphic to the structure of the relationships among the users
(2003).”
Creating a Website, the webmaster ties their own efforts to those with similar interests
using hyperlinks. Designing and placing a hyperlink is an act that requires a certain
level of hypertext mark-up language (html) knowledge and as Adamic and Adar
(2001) state, a form of cognitive, social or structural connection between the websites.
Jackson (1997) and Kling (2000, cited in Garrido & Halavais, 2003) indicate that,
“Hyperlinks represent reasonable approximations of social relationships.”
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relations. Jackson (1997) suggests that the methods of social network analysis maybe
useful in understanding the relations of computer mediated social processes (Garton,
Haythornthwaite & Wellman, 1997). Hyperlinks are not just technological tools but
social channels. Web sites are actors with hyperlinks among websites representing a
relational link (Park, 2003). A hyperlinked system exchanges information and
cooperates around a given shared background, interest or project.
In this paper, the focus is on websites that are connected with the production,
aggregation or dissemination of pornographic material and so-called ‘adult
services/entertainment’. Using the tools of social network analysis applied to
hyperlinks I use measures of closeness centrality and betweenness centrality to assess
which websites are more ‘important’ to the flow of information. The closeness
centrality score of a particular website indicates the number of other websites divided
by the sum of all distances (the shortest path or geodesic between two websites)
between the website and all other websites (de Nooy et al., 2005). A website’s
position indicates whether it has access to information and better opportunities to
spread information. In a highly centralised network, information spreads easily but the
centre is indispensible for the transmission of information. As the network of websites
becomes less centralised the possibility of the information flow being distorted
increases. Closeness centrality is based on how easily a website is reachable in the
network (de Nooy et al., 2005). Another method, the betweenness centrality, of
assessing the ‘importance’ of a website in the network is to measure how large a role
it plays as an intermediary (de Nooy et al., 2005). How many flows of information are
disrupted by a website becoming inaccessible or inactive? If a website is removed
from the network how many detours are required to access other websites, which
websites control the flow of information because of their position in the network? To
paraphrase de Nooy et al. (2005) “The betweenness centrality of a [website] is the
proportion of all hyperlinks between pairs of other [websites] that include this
[website].”
Data Collection
The companies listed in the Mobile Adult Content 2008 – Securing Revenue from
Adult Entertainment’ industrial report, are the starting points of the data collection. I
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searched for and retrieved the URLs for 171 of the 179 companies listed. The list
includes movie production companies, distributers, mobile infrastructure companies,
magazines and a small number of child protection agencies. This list of 171 URLs
was then entered as the seeds for the Hyperlink network extraction. As this research is
in its initial stages this paper focuses on the network generated by the original list of
seed URLs. The boundaries of networks are a contentious methodological issue
within social network analysis and anthropological studies of networks. These
methodological considerations are not the focus of this research paper. However
insight into the nature of the flows of information can be gained from a limited
awareness of the methodological debate.
According to Park (2003), data on hyperlink networks can be gathered using two
methods. The first involves the researcher observing the sites and the second uses
computer-assisted measurements. The use of human coders in the observational
method does allow error to enter the process; it would also involve high labour costs
if a large network were to be assessed. During this particular study it was also felt to
be inappropriate for the researcher concerned, especially as the data was gathered
using a shared public access personal computer. I used the second method of
computer-assisted measurements for this research, namely Issuecrawler1. An initial
list of companies associated with the United Kingdom pornography industry was
obtained via a list compiled for the ‘Mobile Adult Content 2008 – Securing Revenue
from Adult Entertainment’ industrial report.2 From this list I was able to compile a list
of website addresses or URLs to be used as seeds for the hyperlink analysis in August
of 2008. The parameters were set as follows; number of iterations 2, crawl depth 2,
co-link analysis by site and privileged starting point was on. The sociomatrices was
generated using Netdraw. I also used the data to conduct social network analysis
focusing on betweenness centrality, closeness centrality and degree.
This list of 171 URLs was then entered as the seeds for the HyperLink network
extraction; this yielded a network containing 970 nodes or websites, as the following
figure shows:
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1 http://www.issuecrawler.net/index.php
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http://www.visiongain.com/Report.aspx?rid=271
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Figure 1 Results of crawl of 171 seed URLs resulted in a network of 970 nodes.
I then manually removed all 835 nodes/websites that were not part of the initial seed
list of 171. I also left the obviously pornographic URLs of websites (such as Hustler)
on the list and then conducted a betweenness and closeness centrality test on the
remaining 135 nodes. These can be seen in the following figure:
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Figure 2 UK Mobile Porn Industry, 135 nodes with paths. Colour of node depicts
core grouping. Nodes grouped vertically to the left are not connected but appeared in
the original list 179 companies.
The most ‘important’ 21 websites of the UK mobile porn industry with higher levels
of closeness centrality and betweenness centrality are listed below in Table 1.
Betweenness Closeness
ID Degree Centrality Centrality
apple.com 20 1798.407 5011
sonyericsson.com 8 1202.451 5020
ipcmedia.com 6 962.358 5090
vodafone.com 10 881.174 5004
ofcom.org.uk 10 817.146 5023
timewarner.com 5 736.25 5166
symbian.com 12 693.345 5010
aol.com 7 667 5251
opera.com 10 641.4 5030
mbill.biz 7 457.215 5022
o2.co.uk 9 426.642 5036
att.com 7 401.817 5032
nttdocomo.com 9 344.389 5022
eplus.com 6 324.47 5067
mxtelecom.com 9 316.006 5063
t-mobile.co.uk 5 295.907 5043
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Results
All information presented in this section regarding the nature of the businesses was attained
directly from their respective websites. The top 21 companies, according betweenness
centrality measures, facilitating the distribution of pornographic material, including images
and video, as well as their mainstream ‘ethical’ content are Apple Inc. Apple however,
promotes itself as a provider of digital music. It boasts of having sold over 110
million iPods and over three billion songs from its iTunes online store, which also appears in
the network and is reputed by others to facilitate the downloading of pornography from third
parties. The second company to appear on the list is SonyEricsson. Their mission, according
to their website (sonyericsson.com), is to ensure that SonyEricsson becomes “the most
attractive and innovative global brand in the mobile handset industry”. IPCMedia, which is
owned by Time Warner Inc., is a leading UK consumer magazine publisher with 80
magazines including Woman & Home, Ideal Home, Loaded and Nuts. Time Warner Inc’s
business includes interactive services (including AOL), cable systems, filmed entertainment,
television networks and publishing on a global scale. IPCMedia claims that almost “two in
every three UK women and over 45% of UK men read an IPC magazine. That's almost 27
million UK adults”. Another distributer is Newscorp, who create and distribute “top-quality
news, sports and entertainment around the world”.
AT&T, Vodafone Group Plc, o2, T-Mobile, NTT Docomo and Verizonwireless are mobile
phone service providers with a global reach, with mobile telephone networks in Europe, the
Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and the United States. Mbill.biz and mxtelecom.com enable
payments for WAP/XHTML site billing to be made from your mobile phone.
Symbian OS and Opera are the market leading open operating systems for advanced mobile
phones such as 3G. They have created systems that allow the costumer to surf or view the
entire Internet on smartphones, 3G and Personal Digital Assistant (a palmed sized device).
ePlus, enables companies to co-ordinate all aspects of using technology that operate
within a variety of markets including but not limited to Financial Services/Banking,
Utilities, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing and Distribution, Telecom/ISP, Legal, Retail
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and Fortune 500. They also service the Public Sector at the level of local
Government, Federal Government, and Higher Education in the United States.
Discussion
Networks are said to operate globally and are patterned by global imperatives making
them globally orientated in order to maintain the dominant interests of the elite. The
fact that the Hyperlink network analysis does not result in a UK centred network is
not a surprise. The network is dominated by companies founded and based in the
United States of America (Apple Inc.) and a mobile phone producer with a global
reach (SonyEricsson), the gateway into the UK market is via IPCMedia which
distributes an old media form - magazines. This is not a surprise with the global reach
of numerous technology companies and the revitalisation of older media as a result of
the Internet.
The business model proposed for the continued distribution of pornographic material
via mobile phones is a model dominated by the mainstream media, which is a model
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that is geared towards increasing the revenue of paid websites, such as Penthouse.
This strategy includes major media producers such as Timewarner, magazines such as
Loaded and Nuts, and mobile service providers such as O2 and Virginmobile. Another
strategy employed not only by the pornography industry is the so-called ‘free-stuff’
and this approach is exemplified in sites such as youporn, pornotube and redtube
(Helmore, 2007). On these sites access to pornographic movies and images does not
require a paid membership. It must be remembered however that the downloading of
such material will use the consumers bandwidth allocation.
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References
Bakker, P. and S. Taalas (2007). "The Irresistible Rise of Porn: The Untold Story of a
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Bohman, J. (2004). "Expanding dialogue: The Internet, the public sphere and
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(2004). After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere. Blackwell
Publishing.
de Nooy, W., A. Mrvar, et al. (2005). Exploratory Social Network Analysis with
Pajek, Cambridge University Press.
Devaney, P., (2002). “Pornography: the rising star of corporate America.” Marketing
Week, 28 November 2002.
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Terranova, T. (2006). "Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age." Canadian
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Deliberation in the Information Age." Social Studies 88(1): 23-28.
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