Closed markets? Creating communities, personalizing property in late ottoman Egypt

This article focuses on the historical roots of pornography in different media. Theoretically, it is built upon the premise that there is a substantial and persistent audience demand for sexually explicit content and that new technologies have helped to overcome traditional hindrances often associated with accessing, producing and distributing this kind of material. We aim to go beyond a simple technological deterministic approach and focus on both user and supply side. The development from early printing to the development of photography and moving pictures in the 19th century and from 20th century media innovation developments will be tracked. Cases will be used to demonstrate the ways porn and adult content has been commodified from naughty pictures and stories for few into a global industry that serves mass audiences across number of media formats. The commodification of pornographic content in mass media formats is also developing earnings logics and business models of its own. The article will draw attention to the consumers’ relationship to the market and industry practices that are particular to adult content businesses. Finally, it will illuminate how attitudes, legal and moral issues in relation to the content itself have shifted; making room for development of business practices that reveal important aspects in relation to privacy, marketing strategies, monetary transactions, technological and cross media innovations in market economy.

In the pages of her account books, Abigail Robinson, a single woman from a Newport, Rhode Island merchant family at the turn of the nineteenth century, represented the mundane tasks of domestic life as monetary transactions. With each stroke of her pen, she linked the ways and concerns of the market with the "women's work" performed by herself and by the women she employed, corresponded with, and cared for. This article explores each kind of transaction recorded in Abigail's account books—hiring servants, buying imported goods for family and friends, stewarding young relatives, and investing in paper securities—to illuminate the complex ways in which emotion, social obligation, and economic calculation intersected. Strikingly and explicitly, market transactions constructed social relationships and affective ties shaped economic transactions. Women such as Abigail Robinson led lives that were at once more profoundly embedded in market concerns than those of their colonial forebears and clearly different from the emerging ideal of the private, sheltered home. Forged in networks of work and exchange, a commercial consciousness served variously as complement and alternative to "domesticity" for middling and well-to-do free women.

P2P commercial digital content exchange