Porn

Talking about porn in the “Media in the Information Age” class this week. I was planning on only showing the first half of the excellent Frontline episode called “American Porn,” but students wanted to see the whole thing. It’s shocking to me that we don’t spend more time on pornography in media and communication classes, but I am also giving it fairly short shrift in this course. Haven’t even gotten a chance to get to my overheads (pdf, 160k) yet. If these seem disjointed, it’s because they are an odd mix of things I missed in talking about news somehow trying to show up in the middle of a discussion on porn. Somehow, though, the censorship of the two are not as different as they may first seem.

I’m kind of glad we did get to the second part of the Frontline episode, since it discusses a part of the industry that is, well, disquieting. One of the early posts on the discussion board for the class comes from the illustrious Jennifer Kelly who added and discussed a link to a Salon followup interview with “Lizzy Borden.” I think it’s good that students have a chance to think about pornography as an industry. Those things that are beneath the dignity of the average academic, or otherwise unimportant, seem to be the ones really worth understanding.

I need to see if I can get Paul Cambria in to do a guest lecture for the Media Law class next semester.

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