Sex, Love, and Relationships
The advent of the Internet, along with the increasingly widespread use of electronic communication, has created new paradigms of social interaction and individual behavior. The Internet has become a virtual way of exploring the issues of sex, love, and relationships from the privacy of one's home. Virtual chatrooms, pornographic websites, email, and other online forums and communication methods allow the individual to gain access to information about sex, as well as providing an easy way of meeting people and exploring relationships on a global level. They are, in many instances, replacing the traditional forums for exploring love, sex, and relationships. Along with the benefits of speed efficiency and increasing ease of use, online exploration of love, sex, and relationships has many potential detrimental effects. What are the effects of instantly accessible pornography? What is the effect of using a computer and a digital media to explore relationships? What are the factors to consider when judging the effectiveness of the online environment as a suitable forum for developing a relationship? What are the risks of online romance? These questions point to the effect of online technologies on an individual's perspective on love, sex, and relationships.
Consider this fact: the majority of Internet sites are pornographic. Research indicates that surfing the Internet to view pornography is one of the most common uses of the Internet. Computers and networks allow the transfer and viewing of sexual materials to anyone with access to a computer connected to the Internet. Resources beyond the World Wide Web, such as Usenet and BBS services also provide easy access to pornography. Pedophilic and paraphilic pornography are widely available through various computer networks and protocols such as the Usenet, World Wide Web, and commercial "adult" BBS. A Carnegie Mellon research team was able to identify consumers of these types of materials in more than "2000 cities in all fifty states in the United States, most Canadian provinces, and forty foreign countries, provinces, and territories around the world." While the individual can possibly gain access to a degree of socially responsibly information, such as information about birth control, sexually transmitted disease, and health, they also gain access to the multitudes of alternative and deviant sexual material, much of which is potentially offensive and arguably "detrimental".
Online forums where individuals search for companionship, relationships, and love, are darkened by the cloak of anonymity which is bestowed on most all of the users. In such a forum, it is also difficult to develop necessary interpersonal skills for face-to-face interaction. Dating services, such as those provided through websites and personals listings, carry a degree of this same problem of anonymity. While cybersex is indeed a lot safer than physical sex, they are not the same thing. As online communication becomes an even greater vehicle for exploring relationship, this danger threatens to debilitate users who cannot interact outside the virtual scenarios of online communication and interpersonal exploration.