YNOT EUROPE – Often the importance of porn in today’s world is underestimated because of moral and religious sentiment. Sex has been important throughout the history of humanity — the cornerstone of its existence. Wars have been fought over women as sex objects, and people died. But sex — and particularly pornography — can be a power for good, as well.

Just take a trip to the internet and read up a bit to realize that porn played a major role in many of the technological and commerce advances within the past 50 years.

We see five primary milestones.

Perhaps most notably, adult content was a primary catalyst in the development of home entertainment: videocasettes, DVDs and the web itself. Once upon a time, seeing a “blue movie” meant traveling into the “red-light district.” Now consumers can buy DVDs or pay to watch scenes or full-length films online. Because porn adopted the new technologies quickly and decisively, costs of ownership and development times were reduced drastically for mainstream consumers.

Digital photography is another technology that probably would not have developed as rapidly as it did without the intervention of porn. Before the birth of the computer, people traded Super8 films and Polaroid pictures. once between estimators, when the computer was still in people’s thoughts, there was trading in Super8 films and Polaroid. Couples looking to record their erotic adventures had few options, unless they owned their own darkroom.

We all have heard that Gutenberg invented the printing press in order to mass-reproduce the Bible. Few know, however, that demand for the book Ways, a handbook of sexual positions by Pietro Aretino, led to massive and rapid improvements in printing technology.

Online streaming technologies, too, owe an unacknowledged debt to porn. Without the adult entertainment industry “pushing the envelope” early in the web’s history, mega-sites like YouTube, Hulu and most online music sources might still be on the drawing board. Likewise, internet-based video-on-demand technologies grew out of the adult industry’s desire to provide content in easily consumable ways.

The development of e-commerce as a concept is directly attributable to the online adult industry. Sites like Amazon, eBay and all other online stores were born and raised through the example and the thrust of the first porn sites.