My book may be done but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in talking to people involved in its themes. With that in mind, I sat down for interviews with a couple people from Digital Playground, one of the bigger and more media-friendly porn companies, at last week’s Adult Entertainment Expo.

Today, we’ve got a video interview with Raven Alexis (that link is not safe for work), the company’s newest contract star (a contract star is someone who works exclusively for one company - they generally work less, perform fewer scenes, and get heavily promoted in exchange for “working for the man”). In the video, she talks about porn and its use of and influence on technology. Check it out:

What I found more interesting than what Raven said is what she is - she’s a strange hybrid of the porn stars of the past and the porn stars of the future. One area that’s covered off pretty exhaustively in my book, and which I’ve touched on here several times, is how the business of porn is changing. The internet has made porn plentiful, cheap and easily accessible, and it therefore has many people in the business worried about whether their paychecks are going to keep coming. On the other hand, the internet has also empowered many individuals to start up their own porn businesses.

Raven comes down firmly in the middle. She’s earning her keep from Digital Playground under the old star-based, DVD-sales system. At the same time, as she says in the video, she’s fully proficient with the tools of the internet and is running her own operation. She’s obviously a smart cookie, and pretty much the epitome of the next-generation porn star.

The question arises, though: if individual porn entrepreneurs are the future of the business and the big, deep-pocketed companies are on their way out, will adult entertainment still drive technology? Put another way, will individuals be able to fund the same kind of large-scale investment into new technologies the way the industry has for much of the past century?

You could argue that they won’t, but you could also say that individuals may be even more flexible and willing to take risks on new technology than even the big, rich companies. More on this next week.