Thursday, November 20, 2008

Spam - the unwanted tide

The number of unsolicited and unwanted emails transmitted on the Internet exceeds 180 billion per diem. Spam now makes up 90% of the content of email. Curiously, the 10% balance is roughly double the Postmaster's figures for the percentage of personal snail mail. We seem to combine a tolerance for wildly arbitrary commercial assaults with reticence, no matter what form of communication our technology provides.

I am reminded that in 2004, Bill Gates predicted that the distribution of bulk emails spam would be marginalized. Was he not making a serious prediction? Or was he just that wrong?

Clearly, it is "personal life" that is marginalized; persons as such have almost no life. Between being over-run and being bored, or between being a victim of mass media and being one of the spammers, what vitality is left?

1 comment:

  1. As an unreconstructed McLuhanist, the deconstruction of mass media appears long overdue. Modern Human beings are not being "lonely in the crowd", they are being crowded out by mass messaging. Actual authentic "raw" expression becomes rare. The only things that "go viral" are the massaged messages, pretending hot-ness, artificially piggy-packing heat, and bearing the hidden agenda of persuasion, of ironically content-free content.

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