The Sleeping Car -- Pornomag: Page 2 of 7

ornomag
[A Media Analysis of the Time Cyberporn Story]

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The research for the study, "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway," was performed in 1994 by Marty Rimm, then an undergraduate in the Electrical Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. It has two main focuses: the availability of pornography on the Usenet and the marketing of pornography on "adult" bulletin board systems (BBSs) (by far the major section of the study). The Usenet is a set of over 14,000 newsgroups which are connected to by participants over a variety of connections including phone lines, local area networks (LANs), and the Internet (Rimm "Marketing" 5). According to Rimm's study, the Usenet takes up 11.5% of Internet backbone traffic. Of this 11.5%, 3% by message count (but 22% by byte count) is taken up by newsgroups where pornographic imagery is commonly found (Rimm "Marketing" 8). There are 32 alt.binaries newsgroups, where image files are commonly found (17 of these contain pornographic imagery). In a seven day survey which included all alt.binaries newsgroups and a few other newsgroups where pornographic images are commonly found, Rimm found that 83.5% of the image posts to those newsgroups for that period were pornographic.

BBSs are centrally located computers which usually have dial-in customers. They are included by Rimm under the heading 'Information Superhighway' for the rather specious reason that some can now be accessed on the Internet via telnet (he offers only one BBS doing so as evidence) (Rimm "Marketing" footnote 27) . Rimm justifies his study of "adult" BBSs with the statistic that over a four-month period, 71% of all image postings at the five newsgroups found to have the greatest amount of sexual imagery were found to have originated from an "adult" BBS. The scale of his BBS study seems somewhat disproportionate, however, given that this 71% indicates only 1,671 actual images, and his BBS study encompasses 917,410 descriptions of files (450,620 of which were of image files). The study of BBSs, the types of pornography they export, and their marketing techniques, is the major portion of the study. Its only connection back to the Usenet is that in a four month time period Rimm found 1,671 images originating from these BBSs on the Usenet.

Many critiques of the Rimm study have been made, both by scholars in the field and by amateurs, with varying degrees of validity and comprehensiveness. Rimm's research methodology, the conclusions he draws from his research, and his academic ethics have all been subjected to intense scrutiny. Some of the study's research (and the critiques of it) uses specific statistical methods which I am not qualified to examine critically, although the ways in which the results are presented, compared, and combined are easy enough for the lay reader to understand. It is not, however, the place of this paper to critique the study's methodology, but to critique the Time article about it. I will therefore bring up only the major flaws in Rimm's interpretation of his results, as they relate to the Time story. For detailed critique of the study itself, the reader is referred to the articles by Brian Reid, John Quarterman, David G. Post, and Donnna Hoffman & Thomas Novak included in the bibliography.