Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Pandagon: Porno Pottery

Things I learn from reading Pandagon:
Last year, I interviewed author Marty Klein about this weird irrationality about sex and technology, after seeing him lecture about the long history of people using sexual fears as an excuse to bash technological innovations. This actually dates back to the invention of pottery, he said, which caused a panic because people made pornographic pottery.
The post itself is about 'sexting', which is the latest in a long line of ways to do sexual things with new technologies. I suppose any time you have a new technology, there will be a group of people who don't understand it, and a partially overlapping group of people who are easily freaked out by sexuality.

Because I don't want to believe that my species is colossally dumb, I hope the group of people who didn't quite understand pottery was relatively small.

2 comments:

spavis said...

pottery is dirt held together by magic. and the internet is information transmitted by magic.

other technologies:
photography - images replicated perfectly by magic
video - pictures animated (sometimes with sound) by magic

magic and sex are weird and wrong and using the two together makes you sinful.

Protagoras said...

Pottery predates writing by a fairly large margin, so this story is surely made up; we have absolutely no idea what people were worrying and arguing about when pottery was first invented.