Post by Hollis Griffin, Denison University

Two recent events in the world of sex-related Internet services underline ongoing problems that Americans have with intimacy and digital technology. A recent data breach resulted in the release of personal information of those who subscribe to Ashley Madison, an online service that facilitates extramarital affairs among subscribers. Just this week, federal investigators shut down the website Rentboy.com, which posted profiles of gay male sex workers for perusal by clients seeking those services. In both cases, the Internet provided safe harbor for sexual practices that many Americans consider distasteful and/or dangerous, even though so many people are engaging in them.

One of the tenets of U.S. citizenship is the right to privacy. But as Ashley Madison and Rentboy make plain: where sex is concerned, privacy is only ever sacred when the sex you are having is deemed to be respectable. It is interesting that both events took place online if only because the pleasures that people pursued on the two sites can never really be public. Outside of swingers’ parties and Las Vegas, adultery and prostitution are—with a few exceptions—largely verboten in the United States and pushed beyond the range of privacy’s purview. Never mind that people were arranging this sex as they sat hunched over their personal computers. They were looking to have dirty, dirty sex! Hypocritical sex! Dangerous sex! A quick scroll through social media networks and comment threads on news coverage of the two events reveals a just-beneath-the-surface moral panic about sex outside of marriage and sex for money. While there has been an outcry among sex workers and other queer publics about Rentboy’s closure, those charges are nestled amidst much applause about it. All of it makes me question where the line is, exactly, between “proper” and “improper” sexual activity.

Furthermore, Americans tend to think of intimacy online as “less than.” If people were “normal” and “healthy,” they would be able to find it in the real world. In fact, so many people think the Internet is home to pedophiles and perverts that the sex facilitated by Ashley Madison and Rentboy was suspect from the very beginning. It isn’t monogamous or procreative; it doesn’t often cement a long-standing bond between the people having it. It’s carnal and criminal, forbidden and filthy. If the sheer volume and variety of pornography one can find on the Internet is any indication, it’s the kind of sex that many Americans wish they were having.

What both events cover over or hide is more difficult to parse out. Alongside the drama associated with the Ashley Madison hack and Rentboy’s closure are much more mundane truths. The first is that the physical remove of the Internet allows people to engage in the kinds of intimacy that are harder to realize in public life. The second is that those intimacies can sometimes meet needs that more valorized ways of being and wanting do not. If the bodies and acts that people so often desire run afoul of social mores, it raises questions about the viability of the norms that govern intimacy and sexuality in the contemporary United States. Where Ashley Madison sheds light on the lies people tell one another in the name of love, Rentboy underlines the lies people allow to be written in the name of the law.

The Ashley Madison hack and Rentboy’s closure are part of much larger patterns in the United States, where the comforting fictions that so many Americans cling to about sex and intimacy are revealed to be as juridical as they are romantic. The stories we tell about sex and intimacy become the rules that we inflict on one another in the name of propriety. These laws result in punishments ranging from raised eyebrows to jail time, depending on the severity of the offense. In all cases, these laws—the formal ones and the informal ones—shoehorn people into social norms that attempt to govern sex and intimacy. Alas, they inevitably fail. Ashley Madison and Rentboy are news stories because adultery and prostitution are not new stories. Rather, the two events are flare-ups in a perennial debate about whom and how people should desire and be.

The two events also provide an interesting rejoinder to the joy experienced by many on the Left after the Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. Barely two months after the Court declared that United States could not deny marriage licenses to people of the same sex, the Ashley Madison hack and Rentboy’s closure underscore how very traditional that ruling was. It seems that marriage is the only way Americans can ever really condone sex and intimacy. To stray from that script is to be deviant. Rather than bemoan still more instances of dirty, dirty sex online, it seems that another, perhaps more useful way of thinking about these events would be to question the sexual norms that render them “dirty” in the first place.

One of the primary characteristics of television is its liveness, the ways in which the medium constructs a sense of presence and immediacy. McPherson adapts this idea for web environments by calling it “liveness with a difference,” highlighting how the web “structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, [making it one where] we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the moment” (462). She underlines the “volitional mobility” afforded by the Internet, the ways in which user experiences destabilize the orthodoxy of linearity and narrative that attend the consumption of other moving image media. That said, my experience streaming television feels more like “liveness with a lag.” Not only do I have to wait for clips to load before I can watch anything, but I am almost always watching dated content. And I can’t watch many of the things I want to because they are simply unavailable with the Roku technology—to say nothing of the frequency with which the device “freezes” when moving between channels. I am constantly rebooting it in an effort to get it to work properly and then waiting for the content to restart again.

Using Roku, it becomes clear that the liveness afforded by streaming television is hemmed in by the political economy of the medium. The industry practices that structure the experiences of streaming television are still in a state of “becoming.” Not everything streams, and when it does, it’s often older content re-circulated for this new platform. Moreover, devices that sync existing television sets with the Internet are imperfect technologies. The protocols for streaming television are tremendously in flux and seem to change with every corporate quarterly announcement and marketplace product launch. Nevertheless, the facts remains: there’s simply less contemporary television programming available via this new mode of distribution. In addition, it can involve the tricky enterprise of syncing an analog technology—my old, beloved TV set—with a digital stream. These two entities are not always a perfect match.

The moral of this particular story: be careful what you wish for. I saved money by cord-cutting and using Roku is, in many ways, similar to watching television as I always have. But it is different enough that I want to go back. I recently moved into a new apartment in a new state. Calling the cable company to set up service was at the very top of my “to-do” list. Of course, I need to wait nearly three weeks for installation. This seems especially cruel after a year that often felt like I was watching television on delay.

Mission accomplished? Kind of. This isn’t a story that can be boiled down to dollars and cents, though. Streaming television over the Internet involves many continuities with how I’d consumed TV for decades prior. But it also precipitated important changes in my consumption habits that warrant mention here. These continuities and differences are imbricated in developing industry practices related to the release of television content online, as well as technological developments in the convergence of television and the Internet via digital devices.

I follow Tara McPherson’s lead in “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web” where she describes the experience of consuming media in digital environments. In that essay, McPherson is interested in “exploring the specificity of the experience of using the web, of the web as mediator between human and machine, of the web as a technology of experience” so that she may describe the phenomenology of using the Internet to screen moving image media (460). My focus is on one iteration of the activities she describes: watching television over the Internet via a Roku box. Like McPherson, I am interested in the ways that “new” technology both continue and confound the experience of “old” media: what feels different and what changes, but also what feels similar and what remains the same. More pointedly, I want to use McPherson’s thoughts to explicate the feelings of liveness that attend streaming television online.

Receiving a television signal over the Internet via Roku involves several residual elements of television practice. With a Roku box, the consumer browses from a menu, selecting which services to add: Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Crackle, and so on. This feels similar to picking service packages from a cable company: premium vs. basic, etc. Once these “channels” are chosen, Roku users can browse within them for content. This too is reminiscent of more traditional modes of television viewing; it’s like “zapping” until you find something you like—Roku even provides an “old school” remote. After a program is selected, the television screen goes blank and loads the program like an Internet clip, complete with a “Loading, Please Wait…” message. When this would happen, I felt as though I was waiting for commercials to end and “the real program” to start. Thus, protocols for TV distribution and reception developed in earlier contexts continue to shape viewers’ experiences with the medium in the instance of streaming TV online. Well-established paradigms for television spectatorship—changing channels, browsing for programs, waiting for a narrative to begin—still shape the practice of viewing television with a Roku box.

Yet for all of the continuities with prior modes of consuming television, my viewing experiences changed dramatically upon installing my Roku. By nature, I am a television grazer. I typically turn on the set and “zap” until I find something I like. But with the Roku, such grazing is more difficult. The technology’s design prevents users from simply turning on the television and finding programming already in progress. With Roku, every time you turn on the TV, you need to select content, wait for it to load, and only then can you actually watch anything. McPherson calls this the “scan and search” nature of web environments, the ways in which users can call up content at will. While this is characteristic of the ways that many people consume moving image media on the Internet, it isn’t characteristic of the way that I typically watch television. If “convergence” is often the term used to describe television practice in the contemporary moment, using a Roku box pointed to the divergence in the ways that I consume television vs. the ways I use the Internet. In part two, I will directly address issues related to available content and liveness.