It could be her, standing in the low light of a trendy South Philadelphia coffee shop.

There are maybe 10 people — drinking tea and working on laptops — most of whom are cute, pale-faced women with dark hair and a look. One arrived promptly at 4 p.m. and happened to be the biggest young thing in the entirety of mainstream adult film.

She was introduced as South Philly’s Stoya by CityPaper last November, but with more than six years of this city behind her and the heart of a profitable and exhausting porn career ahead of her, Stoya is leaving Philadelphia.

And she’s taking her Twitter account, T-Mobile G1 phone and MacBook Air with her. But the “Goth Girl Next Door,” who has catapulted to among the top names at porn powerhouse Digital Playground, says she isn’t a nerd — she was just raised one.

THE NERD IN HER

“I was three when I was using DOS,” Stoya says, “My mom taught me how to read, and my dad taught me how to navigate DOS.”

She speaks effortlessly about the porn industry’s Internet development, dropping references to BBS. She has two phones and says the “interface is such a pain” on her company-issued BlackBerry. She has reviewed video game accessories. Other performers, Stoya boasts, say she is so connected to technology that she must have a power button on the back of her head.

This is the same 22-year-old who has taken porn by storm enough that, of her roles, four are of the 10 best-selling DVD titles from Digital Playground. She also has a starring role in three of the studio’s four biggest features to date. She capped her first year in porn by being named the top newcomer at the Adult Movie Awards and also won adult film blog Fleshbot’s Extreme Pornstar Showdow. And yes, Stoya interrupts, looking up as if reciting lines, she reads science fiction, but please don’t ask her about it.

“I am so freakin’ tired of talking about books,” she says.” I don’t want to discuss Terry Pratchett or Anne McCaffery or any of those things ever again because then I get 400 e-mails in one day saying, ‘Oh my God, you like that author, have you read Asimov?’ Yes, I’ve read Asimov. Of course I’ve read Asimov. Do you really think you’re the first person to ask me that?”

She has, however, written about what she reads, like William Gibson‘s 2007 tech-centric, science fiction novel Spook Country.

That’s the question, how one of the fastest rising stars in porn can be as much of a geek as perhaps her most devoted fans.

“I’m not,” she says, interjecting before the sentence is all the way out of my mouth. “I’m not even that nerdy. I was just raised that nerdy. My dad worked in IT, I had everything early.”

Stoya says she had everything from a large, early-model PDA to a DOS edition of the Berenstain Bears Learning Essentials.

That side of her has likely fueled her precipitous rise in porn. Her saying a video game nerd just might be her type of guy has to push merchandise.

She just won’t be doing it from Philadelphia anymore.

Below, hear Peter Nowak, author of a forthcoming book called Bombs, Boobs and Burgers, interview Stoya on technology’s role in porn.

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HOME SWEET PHILADELPHIA

Philadelphia seems like a fitting home for Stoya, who seems jarringly real. She is an aggressive and honest upstart, slinging out phrases like “anally penetrated” without apology while mild-mannered young professionals sip tea behind her. But it’s no show, and there is no glitz; she can be irrationally cold and angry.

She loves Nat Mechanics. (See Stoya at the popular Old City bar during a party held by PopPorn, the adult entertainment news site that’s also Philly-based.)

Near Independence Mall, she shot portions of a silent-film vignette with another adult film star of a different stripe. Earlier this month, as Geekadelphia reported, Tony Trov and Johnny Zito, the creators of online comic series Black Cherry Bombshells who we have interviewed, cast Stoya in their entrant to the 48 hour Film Festival.

North Carolina-born and Delaware-bred, she became a teenage transplant here for the ease of mass transit and is now Philadelphia’s adult film star. But one year into her reign, Stoya plans to move to Los Angeles this fall.

When she was first signed by California-based Digital Playground, there weren’t enough commitments to keep her busy there.

Now, she says she often spends more time on the road than at home and much of it is in Los Angeles — where law and culture have made a porn epicenter.

(It can be noted that, in addition to Stoya and Popporn, Philly is also home to its parent TLA Raw and major adult accessories distributor SexToys.com).

But there’s no convincing Stoya to stick around.

“If you squint your eyes, it all looks exactly the same,” she says. “The only difference is the people who are there.”

Watch Stoya speak on her first year at an adult entertainment expo in January.

STOYA ON THE INTERNETS

Of course, the Web helps to bridge geography.

To date, Stoya has more than tweeted:

On Twitter, she gives tweeted:

“I was raised in the South and I have this obnoxious thing called manners,” Stoya says, on why she tries to address the hundreds of fan e-mails and messages she can get daily.

Still she maintains that her use of social media is more an outlet of her obsession with what is new and with a desire to stay connected with friends — who are scattered across the world — than it is a marketing blitz. That’s just a byproduct, she says.

Using social media does, she relents, help curate a community of supporters that can help her create a long-term career — just a handful of years if she’s lucky (and she says she doesn’t know what would come after). Many women who enter porn burn out in months, not years, she adds.

“[A lot of] my ‘colleagues,’” Stoya says, sneering at a question on how she relates to other performers, “are too busy trying to figure out what to do with their boyfriend who is in a band or where to get their next drug fix from.”

The women who are today creating careers in some segment of the adult industry, Stoya goes on, are those using social media.

“Girls like Sasha Grey and Bella Dona and Kimberly Kane, who, you know, are around for more than a year.” So Philadelphia will always be able to find Stoya online, which soon may be the only place you’ll ever find her in the region.

Late in our conversation, as she grew ready for the interview to end, Stoya seemed to broach a reason for leaving that might seem a bit more emotional than simple work-related pragmatism.

“I’m not really the kind of person you can have around small children, so the friends who are getting married and having kids are pretty much cut off anyway,” she says, hiding well any disappointment you might expect her to have. “I don’t need to be in Philadelphia anymore.”

It’s going to be that anthem you hear over and over again this summer, and the artist behind it happens to have grown up in Bucks County, a half hour Regional Rail ride into Center City.

Like a growing collection of young artists, Asher Roth, the artist behind “I Love College,” found his path to a major label album by way of MySpace. But it seems likely he’ll see more than Internet fame.

I helped profile Asher Roth on the cover of today’s Philadelphia Weekly, but during our interview last month, we also spoke about the role social media have had on launching his career.

Roth just might be the first genuine star to have not only been discovered via a social network but also stapled his career prospects to social media.

He is regularly pushing next Monday’s release of his debut album “Under the Bread Aisle,” to his 20,000 followers on Twitter. He’s on the basics like Facebook and Flickr.

And, of course, you can follow his growth on YouTube.

Watch him rhyming before his record deal. There was the time he first met fellow SRC label mate Akon last May. He drove around with Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley, who makes an appearance on Asher’s album, and had dinner with Ludacris in July. When his first mainstream media came on Late Night with Carson Daly in November.

“The street is the street… but that’s changing,” says Steve Rifkind, the founder of SRC, the label Asher is on, a division of Universal. “It’s also wherever the college street is, and, also, the street’s on the Internet now.”

But, for Roth, it started with MySpace.

“It was everything. I was promoting without promoting. I wasn’t going to open mic nights telling people to go to my MySpace… I didn’t have to,” says Roth, a native of Morrisville and graduate of Pennsbury High School. “I didn’t realize the power that MySpace is now.”

In fall 2006, Atlanta-based manager Scooter Braun received a MySpace friend request from Roth.

�I took one look, saw a white boy in a hoodie, and I said �What the fuck?�� Braun says. The music was good enough, Braun says, but he liked Asher�s rhymes. �He wasn�t comfortable in his own skin. I was interested, but not sold.�

At that point, Roth had 112 MySpace friends and just 64 Facebook fans. Now those numbers are more than 65,000 and nearly 33,000 respectively.

“I think at the end of the day, all these resources on the Internet, you might meet someone, you know, on Twitter. All of these have value because at the end of the day, it only takes that one phone call,” Braun says. “Whether that person finds you on MySpace or YouTube or Twitter or wherever, they end up finding you. Take advantage of all those resources because it only takes that one eyeball of the millions that are online.”

Braun called a number listed on Roth’s MySpace profile and, weeks later, they met in Atlanta. Weeks after that, a deal was inked and the next great social media star was born, but Braun takes issue with Roth being called a MySpace star. If anything, he says, Roth should be called a blog star.

�The way Asher has broke in, no one has done it before. No one has broken in on the blogs and gone gold in five weeks,� Braun says. “The distribution line in my marketing plan was the blog. Nah rights, the 2DopeBoyz, the illRoots, the SOHHs, even the one time he was on Perez Hilton. The blogs are where people are turning for their information. They are the mixtapes and the magazines combined. And they�re really a distribution tool.”

Now, he’s showing up everywhere, from MTV to the Wall Street Journal.

“It would be foolish not to really use the Internet now. That’s where everybody is,” Roth says. “The CD that’s about to drop is huge for the blogs. If this album is extremely successful, it’s going to show that the power is back with the people.”

“You don’t have to go to the radio anymore.”

Below, watch Asher talk to Grind.TV about how the Internet helped give him the megaphone he has today.

And on those ties to Philadelphia? Well, he has them whether he knows it or not, as you can see from a nice rhyme he gave BET’s Rap City with Center City in the background.