Is it just me, or is the amount of spam email I (or my email application or my Internet Service Provider) have to filter through actually getting larger? According to statistics published recently by email filtering firm MessageLabs, despite our collective efforts, spam is ‘sploding. By the middle of this year, spam will make up 80% of all emails sent and received worldwide. Eighty percent!

Come to think of it, the good ol’ “snail mail” USPS is still stuffing spam into my “little red flag on the side” mailbox as well. On any given day, if I get six envelopes in the mail, at least three of them will be either from credit card companies offering me a fabulous interest rate (never mind that it balloons outrageously sometime later), or from an insurance company, or what looks intriguingly like a real check until opening it reveals an ad for an auto sale “especially for me”.

But hey, we’re Americans! We love to be advertised to. It’s “in our blood”. Gazillions (technical term for “a whole bunch”) of dollars are spent every year determining what pushes our buttons. Then, even more gazillions are spent pushing those buttons, well, all the time. Except, in many cases, they’re not really “pushing buttons”. It’s more like the “Whack a Mole” game at Chuck E Cheese. There’s no escape.

Think about it. Billboards (not here in Maine, thankfully). I travel a lot, and you don’t really appreciate our enviable lack of “roadside ridiculousness” until you spend some time in the dense billboard forests of NYC or LA.

We’ll even pay to be advertised to. Eight bucks to see a movie, and you get the “value added feature” of a mind-numbing local advertising slideshow, then a couple of minutes of commercials before the movie trailers begin. I’m not talking about “quality”, high-budget commercials made especially for the theater. I’m talking about the agonizing “late night local cable” variety. Kinda makes you long for the days of the subliminal popcorn and soda ads. Oh, no. I can see it now. Subliminal chiropractor ads at the local cinema.

Next time you watch your favorite sitcom, put a stopwatch to the actual time you’re watching “the story” for that week. Let me save you the trouble, so you can concentrate on who slept with who. The average thirty-minute network sitcom contains between 13 and 17 minutes of actual sitcom. The rest? Advertising of some kind.

Don’t get me wrong. Advertising is not bad. There are still many places where ads fuel the delivery of and access to things we need (like this and other newspapers, for example). It just seems to me that we, as a society, may have lost our “balance” when it comes to advertising. Somewhere in among the ads there has to be some content. It’s not hard to imagine TV executives thinking “If we could just find a way to get that pesky story out of the half-hour sitcom and go with straight commercials, we could make some REAL money.”

So how does all this relate to email, spam, and technology? If your email was a half-hour TV sitcom, 24 of the minutes of that half-hour would be spam. That’s right. Six minutes of real story, plot, characters, jokes, and laugh track. Would you watch TV if you only got six minutes of content per bag of Cheetohs? Maybe you would.

We’ll get more into web advertising and spam next time, including the breakdowns on which products and services are the focus of the most spam. I think you’ll be surprised.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski