I really wish there was a video online somewhere of Rose White’s presentation on data storage at 25C3, The Infinite Library: Storage and Access of Pornographic Information.
Of course, it has always been a pain to store pornography — and so we have the cultural trope of a stash of magazines “under the mattress” or in a box hidden in the closet. But as the sex industry shifts toward digital publication at every level, we might imagine that mere storage will become a problem of the past, or, at least, a problem related to legacy materials (books, magazines, videos, comic books, photographs, etc.). Cheap, massive storage media means no more problem, right?
Well, reviewers of porn find that they quickly amass more material than they will ever have time to peruse; librarians who need to provide access to controversial and poorly cataloged material end up overwhelmed; even casual collectors of pornography still need some way to keep track of what they have.
Toward that end, I am doing preliminary research on how people store and access their digital pornography collections. In my early interviews, I have already encountered a fascinating mix of responses; one person has said they store their porn “in the cloud,” while another explained his detailed system for hiding digital porn files from his partner.