Labors of love: netporn, Web 2.0 and the meanings of amateurism

The blurred boundaries between producers and consumers and the increased centrality of user-generated content have been seen as characteristic of Web 2.0 and contemporary media culture at large. In the context of online pornography, this has been manifested in the popularity of amateur pornography and alt porn sites that encourage user interaction. Netporn criticism has recently formed an arena for thinking through such transformations. Aiming to depart from the binary logic characterizing porn debates to date, netporn criticism nevertheless revokes a set of divisions marking the amateur apart from the professional, the alternative from the mainstream and the independent from the commercial. At the same time, such categories are very much in motion on Web 2.0 platforms. Addressing amateur pornography in terms of immaterial and affective labor, this article argues for the need to find less dualistic frameworks for conceptualizing pornography as an element of media culture.