Dennis D. Waskul Knihy

Sex has shaped the Internet from the very beginning. In the process, the Internet has also brought about a plethora of new sexual possibilities, opened new markets for the entrepreneurs of pornography, challenged the boundaries of social institutions, exposed precarious moral dynamics, and created a novel arena for asking important questions about the people who may or may not be grounded in this emerging matrix of computer-mediated meaning. This book takes stock of these changes. Drawing from some of the most notable works written on the subject and original contributions from experts in the field, Net.SeXXX explores the dynamics of Internet sex, entertains implications and consequences, critically examines key conclusions, and raises new questions.

One of the most fascinating dimensions of online chat and cybersex are the ways that their medium, the Internet, allows people to reconfigure relationships between self, body, and social interaction. Online chat participants discursively write a self into existence in a disembodied medium that allows for extreme fluidity and multiplicity; cybersex participants evoke bodies in words and images, manipulating relationships between selfhood and the corporeal body. Perhaps never before have so many people been actively involved in social psychological experiments in which they redefine themselves in ways that are so distinctively at the cutting edge of important social and cultural transformations. Based on over 150 interviews with online chat and cybersex participants, Self-Games and Body-Play is an empirically grounded analysis of how these unique experiences provide a lens for better understanding the nature of personhood in everyday life.