According to Wikipedia, “spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, undesired bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, and mobile phone messaging spam.
Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.”
Underlying the stated assumptions about the cause and effect of spam, there are more considerations besides the knee-jerk reactions of some anti-spamers. For example in the same way improper use of any tool or media may arguably be cause for an undesirable result, the reaction can be just as undesirable.
Let’s start with e-mail. While word filters do work to reduce the arrival of a significant quantity of mail, aggressive filtering before a message gets to the reader leaves the filter operators in the same position as senders - difficult to hold accountable for their mass actions.
Furthermore, some spam filter vocabulary operates out of context only a reader can tell resulting in a non-human form of censorship that can also escape accountability. The growth in spam filter vocabulary compounds the issue of censorship in ways that depreciates the value of email communication in the first place. What’s the point of speaking your mind in an email that’s likely never to be delivered? [. . .and I thought the post office was bad]
While the purveyors of convenience, who are also no marketing slouches, continue to argue for stricter controls, ramp up their aggressive spam filter vocabularies, and unilaterally impose hyper-effective relentless machine censorship on millions of email transactions daily, their actions leave the basis of free speech cracking at the foundations.
Notwithstanding the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and countless other countries and international laws, anti-spam software is being used to suppress communication between human populations world wide without due regard for law or the right of the individual to make up their own mind whether to block the incoming spam or not.
Spam, it would appear, has become an undeclared tool for suppression of communication, a convenient propaganda control mechanism, and in many ways absolutely unnecessary if alleged whining and complaining email receivers are too lazy to filter their own damn email.
There is no law stating that you have to read your mail, electronic or paper. It is, after all, a choice. So what? Do we forego our rights to free speech because we’re too lazy to make our own choices and act accordingly? I don’t think so. In fact I think there is something fishy about the whole spam control mechanisms that we’re faced with today. I’ll let you concoct your own conspiracy theory around this idea because after all, each to their own freedom of ideas. Just don’t expect them to be delivered by email.
The argument of lost productivity and fraud also appears weighted in favour of Big business, Big government, and Big spook groups [BBB]. The vested interest in such special and comparatively small groups that control the majority of traffic in everything from genetically modified food to internet communication, speaks volumes for what civil rights activists call fundamental atrocities and loss of freedoms.
It is my prediction that it won’t be long before the majority of small business stakeholders, who significantly out weigh the minority BBB vested interests, become as well, or better, organized to defeat the spam scourge. Doing so will finally bring the fine art of social and economic combinatronic values back into focus and closer to the phantom called equlibrium hijacked by the BBB and so well covered up by semantical subterfuge.
One alternative in the internet information and disinformation twin deluge is a small life raft going by the auspicious name of Alliance to Refine Content. If you want to voice your opinion or knowledge why not get paid for it too?
Brian Hack currently authors and publishes the Business Builder Report and Alliance to Refine Content that can be accessed through h4h.biz home page gateway. Contact author@h4h.biz
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