Sexy Data

• In Event: Transforming Subjects into Objects

Abstract

This talk focuses on PornHub insights to understand the uses to which PornHub’s vast surveillance network turns bodies over into the service of capital. Unlike many web-based technology companies, PornHub seems eager to promote the fact that it collects a lot data on its users. It publishes statistical and data trends compiled by PornHub’s research and analysis team on its blog PornHub Insights, a version of FiveThirtyEight for porn, whose playful motto is “digging deep into the data.” Based on user browsing patterns, PornHub’s ostensible aim is to “explore the intricacies of online porn viewership.” In fact, PornHub Insights is largely a marketing tool that summons the wonder of quantification to promote the video streaming service through social media and news outlets. This talk funds its evidence in content analysis of PornHub insights and ethnographic research with MindGeek employees. By data mining individuals’ browsing habits, PornHub uses “algorithmic identities” to suggest content and advertisements and softly persuading viewers to continue searching for an imagined perfect image and to enable repetitive and recursive browsing, encouraging viewers to forgo the pleasures of the known for the pleasures of the unknown. Examining the design of these systems helps researchers better understand the workings of biopower (that is, the regulation of individuals through diverse technics of subjugation) at the level of the category, computer code, statistics, and surveillance as a form of interpellation.

Author

• Patrick Keilty, University of Toronto