Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy : Sexual hypocrisy and the Internet.
Human reality is complicated. There's no single you. There's the you that searches Google for "orgy," and then there's the you that condemns Eliot Spitzer. You don't want adultery and prostitution overrunning your community, even if you like to look at them online.
Posted 63 days ago
amanda
Responses to this thread:
Jim Cowie:
Great article. "According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, the defense attorney in the case, Lawrence Walters, will use Google Trends to argue that the community's standards are lower than advertised. Walters "plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like 'orgy' than for 'apple pie' or 'watermelon,'" Richtel reports."
Jim Cowie:
I love the idea that google's aggregate data is a more accurate guide to what the public believes and does than you can get by asking the public what it believes and does. The slippery slope toward a government panopticon just got a little more slippery.
amanda:
"Your fantasies are no longer confined to your head. They're visible, in the aggregate, on Google Trends."
amanda:
I wonder what portion of those searches are a product of actual erotic fantasy on the part of the searcher or a product of curiosity. "Oh so _that's_ what a dirty sanchez is...
colby:
todd:
gregg:
oh, screech, how the once-mighty have fallen. Also, I feel like I have no good idea of what my community's local standards are, so this google trends data is most intriguing.
