Age of Spam
November 26th, 2003 by HenBeen saving up a few thoughts recently, meaning to post etc.
Neil Stephenson has declared the next age to be the diamond age, but it seems to me that the next age is the spam age. Increasing destruction of personal rights and privacy, increasing creation of the individual as a targetted wallet.
It’s not just about email spam, or junk mail, but every other medium with which we are lied to about getting content. Television is increasingly a vessel to deliver the real message [buy buy buy] to us. Half the shows are based on buying things [most techtv. all the fashion, redecorating etc shows]. Some people might know that the ‘fix a house/garden up in a weekend’ originally came from the UK, but before we had that dross we had ‘Time Team’. Perform a weekends worth of archaelogy in a weekend. Amusing if only for the terror a 3 day dig caused the rest of the archaelogy industry.
Magazines are largely spam. I’ve yet to see an advert be split over multiple parts of the magazine, and yet content regularly is. Sys-con are big leaders of magazine spam, but they all do it. A lot of technical books are kind of spam, in that they come from the same people that want you to ‘buy’ their product. That’s a bit ironic to be honest. I’m unimpressed by ‘Microsoft Press’ as it seems hard to trust their integrity, but I applaud every time an open source developer gets a book out. I guess the difference is that I never really believe ‘Fred Bloggs was the lead architect on MS Excel’ etc. Maybe I should start seeing if his name is in the credits.
[Looking at Apple’s Safari, the only names listed are open source names, not a single Apple person that I can see].
Another example, perhaps, in seeing us as pawns in a grand game is the company network. Companies are increasingly [and rightly] defensive on allowing non-company machines into the network [personal laptops etc], and yet it’s assumed that we’ll happily allow the company network into our homes via the wonderful VPN connection. More an inequity than spam.
I’ve diversed a bit, but the main push was that things seem increasingly targetted at manipulating the public. The concept of working with your audience rather than picking their pockets still fails to sink in.