Saturday, April 23, 2005
Living on 'spam' from the groaning board of e-mail
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Riley is a professor of communication
at Virginia Tech.
In this new millennium, the first thing the desk-bound American does upon getting to the office is to check the e-mail. This relatively new technology has a lot to offer but, at the same time, can be maddening.
On the good side, it's inexpensive. No stamps. No more licking and sticking. It's fast and easy. In less time than it takes to fix a cup of coffee, you can send a message zinging around the world - to one recipient or to a whole bunch of widely scattered people at once.
To answer someone else's message, just click return, and you don't even have to type the address. What a deal.
With these advantages to offer, e-mail has all but replaced the gentle art of letter writing and postcard sending. Only hardcore Luddites, those who for other reasons remain unconnected to the Internet, and true romantics buck the trend.
E-mail has also supplanted phone mail, which for a time was the communication medium of choice for the technology-attuned.
Someday the next wonder technology will appear, and quick as you can say "Bill Gates," the digerati will abandon e-mail for fear of not looking in-the-know. This human tendency might be expressed as the "Computercan Theorem": Give modern people a new communication technology, and they'll soon think the world revolves around it. Until then, e-mail is the way to go.
Lately, our appreciation of e-mail's benefits is being sorely tried. Turn on the computer in the morning, and what greets us? Spam, spam and more spam - a long, time-wasting queue of messages consisting of the dishonest, the distasteful, the unwanted and the unthinkable.
My morning dose of spam comes in several categories, and some days it's hard to decide which category is worst.
One candidate high on the list is the remarkable flood of offers coming out of Nigeria and a few other countries that offer hundreds of thousands of dollars if we'll send them a few thousand up front. The usual scenario involves a seven- or eight-figure sum being held in escrow with a few thousand needed to release it, which is where the recipient comes in.
The salutations that begin these messages are interesting in and of themselves: Hallo: (This word is about the only "hallowed" thing in the message), Dear Beloved Friend: (Beloved Friend, my eye!), Dear Learned Friend: (Thanks for the compliment, but no one with the brains of an alligator would fall for this scheme), Dear Respected Friend: (If this is respect, I'd like to see the writer's idea of disrespect), and strangest of all, Greetings, White Man: (Yes, one actually started that way).
You've got to wonder whether some trusting Americans - maybe those who still believe in the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy or political promises at election time - are actually taken in by such absurd, clumsy attempts at robbery. The answer must be yes, however, or else these messages would begin to drop off in number.
Far more crafty are bogus e-mails that try to trick us out of our credit card or bank account numbers. Users of e-Bay have recently received phony messages saying that a problem exists on the recipient's account, and to keep from having the account closed, the user's credit card number or bank account number is needed for verification. This practice is called "phishing," cutesy computer-speak for attempted theft.
That's the crooked spam. A second variety of strange spam consists of discount-priced computer software ads sent by people using such concocted names as "Snaffling U. Cutthroat."
Some of these ads begin with a page or so of barely coherent babble, as do some of the offers for knockoffs of Swiss watches and dubious tooth-whitening treatments. Coming several a day are offers for purportedly low-interest mortgages that begin, "Bad credit? Doesn't matter." At that point, the buyer should definitely beware.
In a third category are the many, many messages from people concerned about our sex lives. Some are simply advertising discount Viagra, Levitra and Cialis, along with Zybban for quitting smoking, Maridia for weight loss and Propesia for hair loss.
Geez. Guess we ought to toss the smokes, slop some goop on our thinning hair, drop a few pounds and strike off for a second honeymoon at Viagra Falls.
Other sex-related spam offers to share with us the secrets of how to meet girls. Or how to seduce a girl. Or how to have "fast sex" with one.
For many of us, this advice comes inconveniently late, and following it would be not only unseemly but dangerous to our continued marital bliss.
Finally, there are messages from the far-fringe nut cases of the political right - people who think the government ought to put a bounty on any remaining liberals while, at the same time, professing to believe that most of our government institutions ought to be dismantled. People who think all taxes are bad and should be done away with immediately. People who think the entire world must do things the American way, or else. People who think our nation's checks-and-balances system means, "Send a check to your conservative politician, and he'll apply it to his balance."
What's a poor, honest, clean-living moderate to do? Wait for the next new technology to come along? Maybe, but what do you want to bet that whatever that breakthrough turns out to be will offer even better opportunities for the wolves to go after the sheep?
