Apologies for the dead air on this blog, but this spurred me to post: Time magazine columnist Bill Tancer noted this week that, according to Hitwise measures of web traffic, 18-24 year olds have put social networking above the seemingly unbeatable kipper app, porn:

Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here’s a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I’ve actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It’s a leap to say there’s a real correlation there, but if there is one, then I’d bet it has everything to do with Gen Y’s changing habits: they’re too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin. Imagine.

(I don’t know much about how Hitwise gathers its data or classifies sites, so keep that caveat in mind.)

In the history of media technologies, porn regularly plays a crucial role at the start, often the first commercially viable use of the new form — especially but nut exclusively the visual media. Generally, other uses join porn as a viable activity, giving the medium a much needed veneer of legitimacy and cloaking our baser impulses. Part of my reaction to this news is actually a little surprise that it hadn’t happened yet — porn is still on top for the generation above this.

Or does this mean that Facebook is the new porn?