![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy | Slate
The online world has its own kind of reality, somewhere between private and public. Typing "orgy" into a search engine is less than doing. But it's more than thinking.
Merits (or lack thereof) of the lawsuit that spawned this article aside, I think with something as vague ("know it when I see it" shouldn't even be a legal term) as obscenity that requires a community yardstick, this is an ingenious tactic. Gaging community standards by Internet searches, while neither scientific nor necessarily representative, is certainly more reliable than asking its members' opinions on an issue. And if my fair trial depended on whether my neighbor would admit to watching, say, group sex videos, I may as well save the entire legal system the trouble and plead guilty.
Taking a step back from incarceration, taboos are broken when your neighbor is doing it too - that's what Google Trends reveals. There are plenty of things I enjoy that very few people know about, but the chance of ever discussing them with our perfect stranger neighbors is less than zero - not because they're illegal, but because it's simply not done. There's a reason we don't live in glass houses. But thanks to Trends, we don't have to. The feeling of going online and finding a community of people who think like you is exhilarating - now we (and our perhaps not-so-square neighbors!) can be assured those people exist where we live. What could we de-stigmatize next?
The online world has its own kind of reality, somewhere between private and public. Typing "orgy" into a search engine is less than doing. But it's more than thinking.
Merits (or lack thereof) of the lawsuit that spawned this article aside, I think with something as vague ("know it when I see it" shouldn't even be a legal term) as obscenity that requires a community yardstick, this is an ingenious tactic. Gaging community standards by Internet searches, while neither scientific nor necessarily representative, is certainly more reliable than asking its members' opinions on an issue. And if my fair trial depended on whether my neighbor would admit to watching, say, group sex videos, I may as well save the entire legal system the trouble and plead guilty.
Taking a step back from incarceration, taboos are broken when your neighbor is doing it too - that's what Google Trends reveals. There are plenty of things I enjoy that very few people know about, but the chance of ever discussing them with our perfect stranger neighbors is less than zero - not because they're illegal, but because it's simply not done. There's a reason we don't live in glass houses. But thanks to Trends, we don't have to. The feeling of going online and finding a community of people who think like you is exhilarating - now we (and our perhaps not-so-square neighbors!) can be assured those people exist where we live. What could we de-stigmatize next?
