Public knowledge of cybersex from media discourse: What relationship between Internet and sexuality?

This work aims to detect the cultural models that organize cybersex discourse, from an analysis of the Italian press, in order to overcome an individualistic and medicalized paradigm proposed by mainstream research. A text analysis based on social representation theory was conducted on a corpus of 52 articles from the major national newspapers and allowed the exploration of the social representation of the phenomenon. The study detected 4 cultural repertoires that refer to different functions of Internet technology on the development of online sexual practices, according to specific conceptualization of cybersex as a (1) substitute, (2) transitional, (3) protean and (4) mythical space. Overall, results suggest that the main function of cybersex does not aim at obtaining immediate gratification by sex consumption, but at experimenting with new roles and manifold identities within a dynamic and interactive social space.