Post modern spam

Do you ever get the feeling that some of the spammers are getting a little bored of their job?

Clifford Stoll, Newsweek 1995, Why the Internet will Fail

Except he didn’t actually say that.

Predicting stuff is hard, and human nature means that we love it when predications go drastically wrong. Think how many times Bill Gates has been reminded that he once said ‘640k ought to be enough for anyone’ or the alleged quote by an IBM employee way that there is a ‘world market for maybe five computers’. What’s missing from these is context,  which is something that Twitter is also great at stripping away from the information that is passed round.

Today I’ve seen a fair few tweets linking to an 1995 Newsweek article by Clifford Stoll. Actually more accurately, most of the tweets say ‘Why the internet will fail’ by Clifford Stoll. The headline  comes from the blog, Three Chant, which picked up an article from Newsweek in 1995 by Clifford Stoll, called ‘The Internet? Bah!’, sub title -  Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t and never will be Nirvana. In which he was arguing against

Visionaries [that] see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

The Internet: Bah. Clifford Stoll, NewsWeek

Not exactly damning the future of the interwebz, if not an overly positive viewpoint. Admittedly he was wrong on some points, such as:

The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper,

However, on others he was spot on,

no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

The main thrust of his argument was that even back in 1995:

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.(…)the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.

The online landscape was very different back in 1995,  there were only 16 million online, access was far far slower, and more expensive and places to communicate were limited but yet it still seems familiar. Today there are over 1.6 billion people with internet access. We have countless more ways of expressing our opinions online, but we have got better at curating  the content that we, and others, produce. We’ve also got better at filtering out the noise and identifying the people we want to listen to, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Stoll covers other topics with varying accuracy but his final point;

What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.

Still rings true, if it didn’t then there’d be no such thing as Twestival, CozyTweet Up, Tuttle or any of the other hundreds of organised or casual offline meet-ups that happen every day. Obviously the internet hasn’t failed, even the Stoll didn’t argue that it would, however neither it is any form of nirvana. It does have a dark underbelly,  characterised by sites like 4Chan and GenMay and even in the carebear areas like Twitter. Perhaps the one thing that Stoll should’ve forseen was that the vast increase in noise would lead us to be less questioning and to accept the news that slips through our carefully crafted online filters.

Poll: PR agencies & bloggers

Between Mr Hallam, Ms Ahern and myself, we’ve raised a little bit of discussion around blogger relations this week – mainly about whether it can be done on a short term basis or if indeed it can be done at all.

I’d like to get a wider opinion on whether PR agencies could, would or should proactively target bloggers. So please take two ticks and record your thoughts in the poll below. Results post will follow.

Career advice spam

I thought the best thing about being a Doctor would be the ability to save lives, apparently I’m wrong

Nepotism spam

Only two possible reactions to this one, well three if you include the inevitable deletion, what are mainly WTF?? and That’s nice.

Oprah Spam

Yes, it’s true, you can all have free proxies. It’s not quite a free car but hey it’s free.

Anti-New Year Resolution Spam

Either this is just coincidence or incredibly well targeted. Either way I’m sure that the cigs on offer are completely genuine and never suffered a tumble off the back of an articulated vehicle

 

Mythical spam

I was starting to believe that the we’d plumbed the depths of various amusing spam times, but it seems I was wrong for today brings a new twist with a polite request on how to buy a mythical creature.

Google suggests both Argos and Amazon but I have a sneaky suspicion that both might be bidding on the phrase ‘where can I buy?’ rather than trying to answer the world’s unicorn needs. Yahoo answers suggests ebay and various methods for catching your own by the use of elves and Michael Jackson.

AQA, the drunken and argumentative person’s favourite way to Google suggests that you can’t buy a unicorn, however if it is a gift for a younger relative to buy a shetland pony and stick an artificial horn on it. Which is blatantly untrue, for if unicorns don’t exist then who is the star of this reality show?

Flattery…

…will still get you spam-ass comment deleted.

Zen Spam

I officially give up pretending to both  you and me that I’m going to stop posting the more interesting spam I get. I’ll stop when it does, till then skip the posts with ‘Spam’ in the title.

Full disclosure over and so on to this week’s comment.

The utter mental mind f’ck that this comment gives me is almost as bad as the time when a Bostonian cab driver interrogated, a very jetlagged, me about the efficacy of the EU and whether if it had existed pre-WWII, would WW II actually happened. Ever had a moment when you thought that your brain was literally dribbling out of your ears? That was me just over a week ago, after a very intense three day visit to Boston. I was barely capable of thought let alone historical European political discourse.

Surely, if we inhabit the body, then we are also in possession of it? Which means that we do possess the wisdom that we apparently lack, or is the physical body an independent entity with which we’ll never truly be a part of, as we lack its inherent wisdom?

Answers on a postcard.