Sex” is one of the most clicked on and searched for terms on the internet. Since the time of the internet’s ancestors, such as BBSs or the French Minitel, sex has been a crucial engine of growth for digital media, both for its ability to attract users, and because it has stimulated new and unex-pected forms of use that had a role in technological evolution. The online sex market in the US alone is estimated to be worth around 100 billion dollars a year

Social media make it much easier to identify and contact people with whom an individual may share passions, interests, and values. These interactions can take place on different platforms: a Twitter hashtag, an online forum, the comments section of a blog, an online video game, or an internal discussion list used by Wikipedia editors.

The spread of social media has been interpreted as the emergence of a third form of social relations, which has been described with definitions such as networked individualism (Rainie and Wellman 2012). Networked individualism is the result of the coordination of the large amount of opportunities and individual choices enabled by digital media.

According to McLuhan, electronic media such as television were destined to transform humanity into a “global village,” that is, a world shrunk by the ability to communicate in real time at a great distance provided by new media.

Research and development, and thus innovation, become crucial for the enterprise.

According to this “cyber‐utopian” view (Morozov 2011), digital networks would lead to widespread access to knowledge and a radical political democratization, as well as to a new economy based on communication and flexibility.