Reply #45: Usually any major advance in entertainment tech involves porn... [View All]

[spin]

for example:

Early cave paintings and sculptures often depict erotic scenes and images.

Even the Bible contains erotic passages:

Consider the Song of Solomon, a deeply sensual and erotic book of the Bible, which describes in lyrical detail the sexual and romantic relationship between a bride and bridegroom. Their dialogue relates to spiritual matters, but relates spirituality through a loving physical relationship between husband and wife. This is the model of erotic “edutainment” that we are proposing. We believe that under the right circumstances, and given the correct content, such adult media has the potential to enrich the sexual lives of married Christian partners.
http://www.sexinchrist.com/pornography.html

And we have the middle ages:

Both English and Italian can trace their emergence as popular tongues partly to pornography. Before the fourteenth century, the gentry of England spoke as much French as English,(9) while the Italian language was a hodgepodge of Latin-derived tongues varying from city-state to city-state.(10) Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387) and Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-51), larded with the sexy and the scatological, passed in manuscript from hand to hand and read aloud to a largely illiterate populace, helped create national languages in both countries.(11) By writing long and popular works in London English and in Florentine, Chaucer and Boccaccio transformed local vernaculars into national speech. Pornography helped.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v49/no1/johnson.html

While the invention of the printing press produced a lot of bibles, it also produced a lot of porn.

Then photography came along:

Three hundred years after Rabelais, photography became a new medium for porn to exploit. Begun as a staid art, requiring long exposures and great stillness, including a headclamp to immobilize the seated subject,(24) photography first lent itself to portraits and landscapes.(25) It was not long, however, before the Civil War taught photography two new uses. The first and more famous was the battlefield photography of Mathew Brady.(26) The second, the more infamous, was pornography.(27) Soldiers demanded more than letters from home, they demanded erotica. So great was the traffic to the front, not only of dirty books, but soon of erotic daguerreotypes and photographs, that Congress passed the first U.S. law proscribing obscenity via the mails.(28) Congress, as usual, was late. By the time the bill passed, it was 1865, the war was over, and the boys were home with their pictures in their pockets.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v49/no1/johnson.html

and movies:
{b]According to Patrick Robertson's Film Facts, "the earliest pornographic motion picture which can definitely be dated is A L'Ecu d'Or ou la bonne auberge, made in France in 1908;{/b]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornographic_film

and of course the VCR:

With the arrival of the home video cassette recorder in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the pornographic movie industry experienced massive growth and spawned adult stars like Ron Jeremy, Christy Canyon, Ginger Lynn, John Holmes, and Traci Lords and directors, such as Gregory Dark. One could now not only watch pornography in the comfort and privacy of one's own home, but also find more choices available to satisfy specific fantasies and fetishes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornographic_film

Sex and violence have been driving forces in the history of technology.