This article reports that with the introduction of high-definition video, the pornography industry has had to alter its approach to cope with the emergence of physical details (‘defects’) that weren’t noticeable on conventional film. For many actors and directors, this problem seems to have an obvious solution: tone, augment, or modify the body until imperfections fade back out of view. There is some discussion of whether consumers want to see such high-resolution images, but there seems little doubt that the HD format is beginning to catch on and is primed for widespread use. This article seems to have been intended to be humorous and barely approaches the underlying factors that will shape the adoption of HD. Sure, as Jacob discusses below, people may prefer to see the body's imperfections obscured, but I doubt that the new image clarity will be shunned. Still a recording of mostly fictional characters engaging in a mostly stylized act, high-definition pornography hardly achieves a meaningfully new degree of realism.

The article does not focus on—but seems to revolve around the question of—the direction of the relationship between the spread of HD discs and screens and the appetite for desirable products in that format. Will the quality and inherent goodness of HD lead producers to use it? Or will producers affect the growth of the new technology by funneling their material into it? I think the latter will almost certainly prove to be the correct portrayal of the growth of HD pornography. Whether or not it happens is not immediately clear, however. The Internet still seems to be the most effective way for the adult entertainment industry to draw hordes of viewers.

The earlier news item, which I read in The Times in print but now can’t find online, discussed Sony’s prohibition on manufacturing HD discs (Blu-ray) for pornography. That article basically argued that a media historian would realize that—all moralizing aside—a medium that prohibits such a lucrative market is stacking the evolutionary deck against itself. This article from the blog Plagiarism Today discusses pornography’s relationship with file-sharing from a similar angle. It asks, why don't pornography companies sue people who trade pirated material in the same way as Hollywood and music organizations? It concludes that the pornography industry actually benefits from the openness of the networks across which it flows even though it seems to be undercut by piracy.

I’m fascinated by this kind of stuff; I don’t really know what else to call it except media ecology. I’m in the process of developing a project that uses the Internet to create an international, inter-university current affairs publication. At Brown, I have been involved with the Journal of World Affairs and interned at Radio Open Source, where I was exposed to a constant stream of Internet journalism (and meta-Internet journalism). Previously, I spent a gap year as a writing intern at the Worcester, Mass., Telegram & Gazette. I’ve been thinking about how media work at least since I was 11, when I wondered what it would be like to have baseball cards on my computer.