A part of the pornification of culture is the pornification of technology.

G4TV, a cable network owned by Comcast Corp., has been covering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from Las Vegas this week and kicks off prime time special coverage tonight at 9pm ET. Of course, hip new gadgets like the iPhone (which actually was debuted at Macworld 2007) aren’t enough to appeal to “the male 18-34 audience and their fascination with video games, the Internet, broadband, ics and animation.”

What’s missing from that list of interest? Porn, of course. That’s where the Adult Entertainment Expo es in, serendipitously timed to match up with CES. G4TV is advertising dual coverage of both CES and AEE as “two days of gadgets and girls.”

But as menter in a G4 forum notes, “You know, there are female gamers/sci-fi fans too. Like, people who prefer to be thought of as more than pieces of sexy sex meat.”

She continues,

But, silly me, why should G4 care if women like games, right? So much easier to play to stereotypes and mercials about how men need ‘balance’ (like tech and ‘sex’ (meaning, clearly, scantily clad skinny white women) equals ‘balance’). Yay for G4! Who cares about women!

Poo to your advertisements and your stupid anti-girl sex shows. I guess I’ll need to start looking elsewhere for my gaming and sci-fi needs.

You go, girl.

Of course, the ubiquity of pornography on the Internet is the stuff of legend (although often of the urban variety). While pornographic websites on the web are estimated to do over $2.5 billion in business annually and about one-quarter of web searches are porn related, a recent government study has found that 1% of Internet sites are porn-related (other estimates have put the range at 10% or higher).

Even so, 20 percent of men and 13 percent of women admit accessing porn at work. This has led some, such as PJ Doland (HT: Slashdot), to entertain the idea of a NSFW (“not safe for work”) HTML attribute or tag that could be added to questionable content. Doland writes:

This isn’t about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a[n objectionable] link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel fortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content.

An idea like this has the potential to achieve through voluntary measures what the proponents of the .xxx domain extension had hoped to plish by segregating explicit material from the rest of the web by an obvious marker.

Some church groups opposed the idea of a .xxx domain because they thought it would lend credibility to Internet pornography, and ICANN temporarily shelved the idea (although it may be revived).

Christian philosopher Albert Borgmann has written that “underneath the surface of technological liberty and prosperity there is a sense of captivity and deprivation.”

Augustine described the relationship between desire and deprivation in his Confessions this way:

The truth is that disordered lust springs from a perverted will; when lust is pandered to, a habit is formed; when habit is not checked, it hardens pulsion. These were like interlinking rings forming what I have described as a chain, and my harsh servitude used it to keep me under duress (8.5.10).

It would be hard to imagine something on the Internet that contributes as much to this binding of the will to sin than pornography, making the work of groups like the XXXChurch (who are covering the AEE in their own way) all the more pressing.