SPAM DESTROYING USE OF E-MAIL

SPAM DESTROYING USE OF E-MAIL
Providence Journal: Morning. Another day begins. You boot up your computer, check your e-mail and -- "You have 623 new messages!" Among them: "Cure over 157 Degenerative Diseases," "Debt got you down?" "Florida vacation giveaway" and "Never pay for porn again."
Somewhere in there might be a friend saying hello, an invitation to a dinner party, or maybe an important memo from your boss. Good luck finding it. You could change your e-mail address, but they'd still find you. They have very sophisticated ways of finding you. They have technologies that seem to know your e-mail address before you even select it.
They have programs that send e-mails to every address they can think of, whether or not it belongs to somebody.
Filter
You could get a filter, but an awful lot still gets through. And you'd also risk blocking e-mails that you might actually want, since the technology is far from perfect. You could respond and ask to be un-subscribed, but that only tells them that you are an actual person who reads e-mail, which tends to bring on even more unwanted correspondences.
Spam, the colorful name for unsolicited commercial mail, is an epidemic that has become a plague. In July 2001 there were an estimated 1 million spam e-mails a day; in July 2002, there were an estimated 5 million daily, and growing. By some estimates, 35 percent of all e-mail is now spam -- up from just 8 percent in September 2001. Spam technology is only getting better, and Internet connections are only getting faster.
The future of e-mail is looking very, very unpleasant indeed. So far, about 20 states have enacted laws to try to stem spam, with very limited success. Most laws merely require spammers to disclose that they are sending spam and give people a choice to opt out. This does nothing to limit the amount of unwanted e-mail, which is the real problem.
It is this oppressive volume (about 10 percent of it pornographic, by the way) that is rapidly destroying the use of e-mail.
Sexual function
Parents are starting to prohibit their children from using e-mail, fearing that their 9-year-old will be inundated with invitations to "Increase Sexual Function." People are missing important e-mails because they are changing their accounts so rapidly or because their accounts are so overloaded they can't receive any new messages.
NEWS VALUES
Washington Post: A thousand or more human beings died last month in an awful accident, but chances are that unless you follow the news fairly closely you were hardly aware of it. A badly overloaded ferry went down in the West African country of Senegal. The death toll is uncertain because children under 5 traveled free and thus weren't included in the count of passengers.
The disaster was reported around the world, including in The Washington Post, but mostly it was a story for the inside pages, the columns of "foreign briefs," the news summaries. Most people in this country never read or heard the awful details: that fishermen dived near the capsized boat and saw masses of struggling passengers, many trapped in air pockets, women clutching their children, all trying to escape; that bodies washed ashore in large numbers and had to be buried by nearby farmers; that masses of people gathered at a pier in Dakar searching frantically for any trace of a loved one, nearly always without hope. (There were only 64 survivors.)
Poverty
Why is much of the world so indifferent to this kind of tragedy? It has to do, of course, with distance, race, poverty and perhaps even with the absence of an interesting villain other than the government, which operated the ferry. A couple of officials have resigned and there are promises of compensation for the families of the victims, but surely there will be no arguments about millions of dollars as there are in the wake of America's mass tragedy. The only equivalence for these widely separated peoples is in grief and loss.