There's a popular folk theory, apparently of Freudian inspiration, that the driver of any technological advance is either sex or warfare. However exaggerated, like a broken clock, this theory is occasionally right. It was in the case of AOL, where users flocked for, if not sex exactly, then potential titillation, and who knows what might follow—much the same proffer that draws college students to frat parties. In any case, chat rooms catering to seekers of anonymous sexual titillation and flirtation were by far the most numerous and popular, so much so that over the mid-1990s, AOL became fairly synonymous with cybersex, anonymous virtual sexual encounters conducted entirely by typed messages.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 709