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Email Spam one of the downsides of tech
By Lee Kucera
DO NOT DELETE THIS MESSAGE. It's a command, and it sounds serious, from one of the dozens of purveyors who use my email every day to lure me onto their websites.
They promise to make my dreams come true with instant weight loss, a low-interest mortgage, automatic credit, a trip to Hawaii (ABSOLUTELY FREE!), the means to convert $99 into $588 as many times as I want, and big thrills if I join them in their access to hidden cameras in girls' locker rooms. They don't hesitate to tout financial pyramid schemes and chain letters, which I thought were illegal, but apparently aren't if you assure people THIS IS NOT A CHAIN LETTER.
In addition, I seem to be on the mailing list of a persistent lady named Luscious Linda, whose red-lettered invitations I send routinely and immediately to the trash bin. I can't be certain of the exact nature of what she's offering, although I think I have a pretty good idea.
These email hucksters are belligerent ("Your Future may Depend Upon Responding NOW To This Offer!"), accusatory ("What are YOU doing to get noticed?"), dictatorial ("You're going on a cruise!"), ungrammatical ("Get a university diploma fast like now!") and dumb. Or else they think the rest of us are. Our lives are cluttered with them nevertheless, because the Internet, in a few short years, has become a free-for-all garbage dump.
There have been touching news anecdotes about people finding medical breakthroughs, lost relatives and old war buddies through worldwide access to information provided by the Internet. But the majority of us don't use it for life-saving or serious purposes. It's simply a convenience or a leisure-time diversion.
The price tag is that we have to slog through mountains of unfiltered junk to get the nugget of information or communication we want. We must make difficult decisions about children's access to pornography. We say goodbye to the concept of personal privacy, waste hours at home and at work on pointless Net surfing, and become increasingly alienated from traditional social interaction. And we still have to determine what on the Internet may be factual and what is doomsday nonsense disseminated by loonies.
The flip side of American ingenuity is that we tend to be suckers for gadgets and gimmicks. Remember the electric knife, the waterbed, or the Salad Shooter? Most of us finally figured out, after the initial novelty had worn thin, that electric knives were less efficient and more trouble than a good steel blade. Waterbeds constitute an invitation to visit a chiropractor. And the Salad Shooter was much ado about nothing.
The "forward" icon in email programs is another gadget that gives everybody and anybody the capacity to disseminate any notion, no matter how outlandish, to the entire world. One of my anonymous email salespeople offered to provide me with 57 million email addresses for only $149. The mind boggles.
Author Arthur C. Clark may have overstated the case when he called the Internet a worse drug than heroin in contemporary American society. But the argument could be made that we tend to be so seduced by advances in technology (genetic engineering, television, and nuclear weapons come to mind) that we don't try to distinguish between what we are capable of doing and what we should be doing. At least, not until the innovation has already become part of everyday life.
I confess. Last weekend, for the first time, I ordered groceries through Webvan.com. And I'm telling you, I felt like a person who just got religion: the entire world looks different to me. They bring the stuff to the door, for goodness' sake.
I'll go on sending email as a handy tool for scheduling meetings and confirming lunch dates and using the Internet rather than driving to the library to find out how to spell Mark McGwire's name. But nobody will ever convince me that online research is more effective than paper research for anything other than quick and superficial fact finding.
I still have an abiding mistrust of handing all human communication over to a transient click of a finger and a dread of the trash culture that is embodied so intrusively in the email peddlers who clog my In Box every morning.
And, for the record, I did absolutely nothing to invite the attentions of Luscious Linda. I swear it.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
