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which arguably was the most profound statement ever made concerning the art of attracting members of the opposite sex, as well as its clear implications for the rest of the post-war design community.

While it is apparent that the computer age brought with it the need for a whole new crop of terminology, it is less clear why the Dungeons and Dragons inspired tech-geek lingo of the late eighties was dropped for the morally degenerate potty talk that permeates the web design community of today.

The answer, simply stated: The success of pornography.

It is estimated that there are over 1,000,000 pornography related sites on the web today compared to 60,000 in November of 1998 [1]. Widely reported to be the only on-line commerce niche that has turned a profit consistently throughout the nascence of the world wide web, the adult industry has reported a growth rate of 40% yearly since 1997. Such incredible success will, no doubt, draw out a virtual army of sycophants, and yet it is still shocking to see an establishment as sober as the design community so willing to march in step to the tune of lechery and lasciviousness.

In Richard Coggins groundbreaking work. "Byte This. How Pornographic Terminology Has Infiltrated the Design Community" (Queens College Press, 1999) , we see documentation of the beginning stages of what now has become an epidemic. Much like Thomas Kuhn's much referred to "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", Coggin's paper exposed what now seems obvious, to a world that was at the time both blind and naive. Words like "software" and "hardware" were exposed for their shameless mimicry of the porn terminology "softcore" and "hardcore" which was used to delineate degrees of sexually explicit material. It became increasingly obvious to a small but devoted number of academics that the commonly used web design terms such as "layout", and "under the fold" and their obvious pornographic implications could no longer be left to mere coincidence.

In the few short years since the release of Coggin's BTHPTHIDC, filthy language has crept in to nearly every corner of the web designers trade. One can sit in a boardroom among the most distinguished of clients and listen to an art director converse with a senior programmer about whether it is possible to "stream" from the "front end" into the "back end", and vica versa! Digital cameras and external memory drives ("drives" of course an obvious reference to Freud's "libidinal drive" or the more contemporary "sex drive") come with instructions on how to "mount" the "device" on your desktop, a scenario reminiscent of the popular boss/secretary setup to a plot-starved pornographic film.

Software developers have gone so far as to use this language as marketing ploy when naming their products: One of the most popular web animation software packages is named "Flash" (need we say more), with which an animator makes movies that must be "embedded" into an HTML page, or as the case may be a page created with XML (which, at least to this author, might as well be named XXXML so as not to insult our intelligence). Search engines offer higher placing on their results pages, or "positioning" based on a "scoring" of keyword frequency with the ultimate goal of gaining - continuing with the exhibitionist tone set above - "exposure".

Now that pornographic lingo is so widely accepted it is no shock to find all sorts of degenerate language prowling about web based and interactive theory. The drug culture scored victories early on when the benign term "visitor" gave way to "user", a "user" who's main activity is supplying "hits" to those with web pages, the aggregate experience being referred to as "traffic". Scatological references such as "web log" (Log coincidentally was the first word ever sent over a network in 1969 at UCLA, Stanford), the onomatopoetic "GUI", and the more obscure "link" join the cleverly disguised sadomasochistic verb "byte" and its less concealed past tense "bit".

From the designer, to the strategist, all the way to leading interactive thinkers, the reverberations of this shift in terminology can be felt. Jakob Nielson, the outspoken web theory guru is no doubt sub-consciously paranoid of his own ability to perform in such a porn-friendly space and has re-opened an age old sexual conundrum thinly veiled as an argument over the principles of web design. Nielson is wary of "large", "unconventional" or "flashy" websites (read "size"), preferring instead to focus on "usability" or "functionality" (read "motion in the ocean") as well as the familiar. Not only does Nielson lash out against the misrepresentation of male member size in adult films, but he manages to make a statement in favor of traditional family values. Although a valiant effort in favor of decency, the design community suffers when Nielson veils his protest under the guise of design theory.

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1) http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/projects-00-01/pornography/technology.htm