Dorm porn

Detroit's Channel 4 local news ("the Defender") reports on the shocking fact that students sometimes make videos of themselves engaged in sexual activity in their dorm rooms. And, worse yet, they send their videos to the nice folks at daredorm.com (NSFW!) in exchange for lots of money.

Can you imagine?  Students having sex in the dorms? Video cameras? The internet? Money? What is the world coming to? Surely the end times are near!

Some thoughts.

1. Someone at the UM public relations office scored a great big coup in getting the UM's message to Dare Dorm broadcast for free on the local news.

2. The nice folks at Channel 4 provided a lot of free advertising to the Dare Dormers.

3. Note the use of students (presumably carefully selected for their negative views) to provide the illusion that Channel 4 is engaged in reporting rather than running an anti-sex editorial. Could they really not find a single student with something positive to say about getting lots of money for doing very little work?

4. So let's see. Suppose that you can get $10K for a video. At typical local wages for undergrads, that means putting in, say, two or three hours of time rather than 1000. Those 1000 hours could be spent, say, studying. They might allow an aspiring student to take harder classes or complete a harder major than he or she otherwise would. Is that necessarily a bad tradeoff?

5. In the age of facebook and surveillance cameras does anyone really think that one video on Dare Dorm is going to ruin someone's life, as suggested by the undergraduates interviewed for the story? How exactly will someone's children find their parents' Dare Dorm video from among the zillions of porn videos on the internet?

6. Note to Channel 4: there are lots of important things to report on in the Detroit metro area. This is not one of them.