Middlemen and The Social Network, 2 Movies, 2 Eras Intertwined
Two movies have recently come to theaters, The Social Network and Middlemen. Both films depict, with a slight bit of Hollywood embellishments the rise, fall, and rise again of two businesses: internet porn and social networking.
For acting and overall entertainment, I would have to give my vote to “The Social Network”. However, for the importance of making the internet profitable for all “Christopher Mallick”, portrayed by Luke Wilson in the Movie Middle Men, connected the two most important dots in making the internet a profitable medium, ecommerce. He was one of the first innovators to combine engaging content and commerce on the internet. This single act, of making content profitable, gave birth not only to the world of online pornography, but more importantly it acted as a catalyst for the proliferation of internet technologies such as Affiliate Networks, Online Advertising, Video Chat, Virtual Worlds, Digital Rights Management, Content Management, Cascade Billing, Mobile Billing, Mobile Content Delivery, and yes even Social Networks.
Do I believe that porn created or began many of these technologies that later became commercialized? Actually I do, because once mainstream companies commercialized on their success, they had a much broader appeal to a global audience, investors, and media outlets. This adult to mainstream paradigm shift has made the internet not only profitable, but socially acceptable. I know this for a fact when I say Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook was not the creator of social media, just as Steven Chen, co-founder of YouTube, did not create video sharing. Their profitable, but not social accepted predecessors could be tracked back to adult innovators such as Andrew Conru, Friend Finder 1997, and Co-Founders Rick Latonia and Mark Womack, Consumption Junction in 1999. Thus from the loins of adult media, mainstream has flourished.
Today, over 30% of the US population is connected through social media sites such as FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, with currently thousands of social networks to choose from, with dozens surfacing daily. So take some time and give thanks or curse the adult industry and its supporting internet culture for its influence and catalyst that have exponentially grew internet and electronic commerce to what we know today.
In the end, social media, built on a somewhat seedy past of Middlemen, has given a new gold rush to electronic media. Capitalistically, social media has opened a free flow of ideas into commercial ventures that redefines how we as a global civilization engage and interact. Moralistically, our definition of decency as the conforming to the standards of today’s newly socialized culture is subjective at best. Thus, our personal views have now become fluid and malleable based upon the external influences social consensus, pop culture trends, and even mainstream media.
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