Porn star Ron Jeremy caused a stir in The Great Porn Debate at the Consumer Electronics Show last week by saying that studies have found that "violent video games are a much bigger negative influence on kids".
CES at the Las Vegas Convention Centre coincides with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at the Venetian hotel. In this case, Jeremy was also promoting tools that help parents control their children's access to undesirable content. He said: "Because we make porn, we are the bad guys. We don't want kids to watch porn but yes we recognise that it happens. We are not in favour of that," reports BBC News.
The porn industry is keen on products such as InternetSafety.com's Safe Eyes as a way of making content inaccessible to those under 18. This is a problem because of the amount of "adult" material that is now widely available. "The Internet has changed the game completely," said Craig Gross, the activist debating (not for the first time) against Jeremy. "What we used to have to work hard to find, you now have to work hard to avoid."
Presumably, this ubiquity is not good for the porn business, which sees its products widely pirated. In a blog post, the BBC reporter Maggie Shiels said Jeremy "heaped further scorn on the net because, he said, it is putting his industry out of business":
"People can download stuff for free these days, so why the heck are they going to buy it? The only ones making money out of porn are the novelty companies. I just hate the internet in general."
Jeremy also offered views similar to those of Nicholas Carr, a former editor of the Harvard Business Review, who suggested that Google is making us stupid. Sheils quotes Jeremy saying:
"I am a former school teacher, I have a masters degree and two BAs, and I think the internet is making people stupid.
"It's good because you can research any topic. In my day, we went to the encyclopedia for that. Nowadays, though, kids can't memorise anything. No dates, no times tables, no history. If there is anything you need to know, you just press a few buttons. We could be giving rise to a generation of idiots."
Games companies also have problems with internet piracy though violent games are perhaps not as visible online. Like the porn industry, the games industry has ratings systems that are intended to keep unsuitable material out of reach of minors. However, it also has a perception problem: computer and video games are often considered as being "for kids" even though most players are adults, whereas pornography is considered unsuitable for children. There may be cases where adults allow children to play 18-rated violent games when they would immediately stop them from watching pornography.
But whether violent video games are actually a much bigger negative influence than pornography is another matter. The influence of both types of material has been argued at length, and Jeremy didn't provide any reference sources for his observation.
