What is Spam?

By B. Dear

Spam is an interesting word, and the term is fairly new. People say that it comes from a Monty Python sketch where the word spam is used over and over again in a rather annoying manner.

Rather than post definitions of what spam might be, I will ask the reader to do their own search to find out what spam is for themselves.

Go to Google and search “define:spam”. You’ll notice that you get a lot of definitions, each one of them different than the rest. When you view this list of definitions, you’ll notice there is a lot of variety in the definition of spam out there. I also can’t make a strong distinction between spam and marketing. To me, they are basically the same thing.

The term “Spam” originally came from the abuse and overuse of email as a marketing medium and people’s resulting frustrations. The term is now being used to apply to anything that people don’t want to see on the web. When spam is defined this way, it can be said that television, radio, telephone, cellular and the Internet all have their own forms of spam. It’s called advertising.

Spam could be defined as repetitive, unwanted display of a product or service. I say that marketing is always repetitive and unwanted for the recipient. I don’t go to websites to check out their advertisements. I also don’t watch TV for the commercials. I do, however, realize that somebody has to pay for the service I am using and I would rather an advertiser do it than me.

So then, is advertising bad? Is it also spam? Should it be banned?

People now use the term spam to refer to things that they don’t like. This would be fine except the world is full of things that we don’t like. We can’t censor them all out without destroying something that others do like. If we start to censor everything that we don’t want to see, the collective censorship will start to eliminate everything. What I deem post worthy, you may not. If users are trusted to mark items as spam for deletion then everything will be gone in time.

Well if users aren’t the answer, then how do we determine this? Do we leave it up to the owners of a service to filter out spam? If we do, they will decide that anything that doesn’t make them money is spam. That is how business works. Keep the things that generate dollars and eliminate the dead weight. The end result will be the elimination of the smaller websites and blogs, and with them a lot of interesting content.

A possible solution to this problem, may be some kind of profile-driven content filtering service. Maybe you could see what you opt to see and exclude the rest. All information would be posted but the user would only see the items that they feel are desirable. It would be a spam filter for websites. Just a thought, maybe there are programmers out there who might be interested in developing such a service.