On Feb 19, 2005, at 5:54 PM, Allan A Friedman wrote:
I am curious as to why these groups are not filling our inboxes. There are enough web-savvy conspiracy theorists out there, and some of them must be desperate to wake us sheeplike masses from our ignorant slumber. They call in to AM talk shows. Sometimes they leaflet a neighborhood. Where is the spam?
It's in my in-box. I get stuff from someone in Cambridge, MA who appears to believe that every public official who has anything to do with the Charles River is part of an "evil" cabal attempting to kill off geese in the Charles. I have no idea how this person got my address, and I certainly never asked to receive their ranting. Further, I get political stuff from family members--mostly urban legends about political candidates/parties with whom they disagree--that is certainly unwanted, and which they must certainly know I don't agree with, just because they send these messages to everyone in their email address book. But this this spam? Must it be unwanted AND sent to people outside one's circle of friends, family, acquaintances, and co-workers? (If it isn't spam, its still an interesting phenomenon.) Whatever the case, why don't we get (more) stuff that is both unwanted and from folks we don't know? Part of the answer has to be that people dumb enough to think it would have any positive effect are unlikely to know how to spam people. Another part of the answer might be that those who could bring themselves to believe in the effectiveness of political spam--e.g., LaRouchian's who spam us with leaflets on the street--are political radicals whose radicalness is not the result of political thought so much as a need to be *seen* as outside of the mainstream and/or a need to feel rejected by the mainstream. Both of those needs are wonderfully satisfied by pamphleteering for unpopular causes on a street corner, but are not at all satisfied by spamming in its fullest, anonymous, form. (This also provides some explanation for the limitation of most political spamming--if we can call it that--to folks on the spammer's email address directory--those directories only contain folks who will be able to identify the "spammer" and thus be capable of rejecting them and/or contain folks who the spammer will be able to perceive as viewing them in a socially significant way as outside the mainstream.) --Christian Nelson Christian Nelson, Ph.D. Scholar in Residence Dept. of Marketing and Health Communication 120 Boylston St. Emerson College Boston, MA 02116-4624