Cyber Sex: Sexuality, Youth, and Cyber Space

It is a great honor and pleasure for me to deliver this keynote speech at a conference designed for the NET generation, a generation that is growing up within an environment and a lifestyle built around the use of digital media. This new generation, along with its unpredictable but fascinating developments, has attracted the interests of educators and advertisers as well, although mostly for purposes of better supervision or better manipulation. And nowhere else are these intentions more obvious than in the area of cyber sex. World-class sociologist Anthony Giddens has described the late-modern world as one in which personal life as well as intimate relationships have become open and self-reflexive projects that involve everyday social experiments by the individual (8). And nowhere else is this self-reflexivity and self-experimentation more rigorously practiced than sexual liaisons on the net. So my talk this morning will be devoted to laying out these new formations of cyber sexuality as well as emerging efforts to curb them. I will concentrate especially on the individual-based rather than the commercially operated sexual contacts on the net.