Abstract

Pornographic tube websites such as Pornhub have drastically altered the style, technology, and business of mainstream porn on a global scale. Strangely, few scholars have sought to assess how pornographic tube sites function within the media genealogy of online pornography. This thesis begins that work through an explication of Pornhub's statistical and viral press vehicle: the Insights blog. Through an interdisciplinary methodological approach I analyze the material and semiotic architecture of the blog including: the blog’s use data visualizations, its production of images, the techniques by which it collects and processes big data, and its perpetuation of disembodiment through its relationship to information. Free online pornography is remarkable for the conglomerate of technical, linguistic, material and visual structures that comprise any encounter one might have with it. I analyze the essentially pornographic paratext of the Insights blog to begin teasing out these structures. In addition, I show how online pornography is one of our most useful tools for accessing the posthuman experience, or the process by which the structures of the world move further into the Internet.