Samantha Cole is a senior editor for Motherboard, Vice’s science, and technology outlet, where she covers sexuality, online culture, platforms, and the adult industry. Her decade in journalism spans from hyperlocal newspapers to national and international outlets, including Popular Science, Fast Company, and Al Jazeera. From the moment there was an “online,” there was sex online, too. Famously, software engineers developing formats like the jpeg used as a test image “Lenna,” Playboy’s November 1972 centerfold. Early bulletin boards and multi-user domains quickly came to serve their members’ sexual musings. Facebook started as a way to rate “hot or not” Harvard co-eds. Virtually every significant development that defines the internet we know and love (and hate) today – privacy issues, online payments, online banking, dating, social media, streaming technology, and mass data collection – came out of the meeting of sexuality and technology. But the internet arguably changed modern human sexuality by giving every imaginable non-heteronormative community a place to explore, fantasize, thrive, and be accepted. How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: A History (Workman Publishing) is a serious and highly entertaining look at the intertwining convergence of sex and the digital space.
