Wednesday, January 02, 2008
What is an Email?
Went to a movie and dinner with [someone]'s family last night. We saw The Great Debaters, a movie that I really enjoyed, though it may have violated one of my expectations about a historical drama. I'll do some more research and maybe get back to you.
At dinner there was some discussion about what an email is. Literally, it would be any electronic mail, no matter what the content. So, literally, spam would qualify as email. It's electronically generated, often sent to every possible email address. It's certainly not personal. I get stuff about AARP membership, about refinancing my mortgage or about how to make my 'johnson' longer. I'm not a senior, I don't own a home and my 'johnson' is just fine, thank you. None of that is for me. It's analogous to junk mail of the 'snail' variety.
Why do we get so much spam? I really haven't looked too much into it, but my guess would be that it costs virtually nothing to send millions of emails detailing the wonders of your product of business. Think about it, to do the same thing through the postal service would incur printing costs for the ad and would incur huge costs for postage. Email is so much more efficient, so efficient that as a spammer, you don't care if your message will be instantly deleted by 99% of the people who receive it.
We do the same thing with jokes or stupid photos we receive via email. You receive something via email, get a chuckle out of it and pass it on. Why do you pass it on? Because it doesn't cost you anything to do and requires very little effort on your part to do so.
You would never think of taking some of the postal junk mail you receive, placing it in an envelope, addressing it to a friend or loved one, applying proper postage and sending it on. You probably wouldn't do that with a joke a friend mailed to you using the good old US Mail. Both would take effort on your part and a minimum expenditure for postage. Let's face it, you probably wouldn't do it.
When someone forwards you a joke they received via email, does it qualify as email. I'm not talking literally anymore, I mean does it qualify as correspondence? Is there anything that sending a forwarded joke onto someone (or many people) you know (or don't know) provide a substitute for actual human contact?
I would say no. Forwarding something you received via email, something written by someone else, something that essentially took you absolutely NO effort to send on IN NO WAY provides a substitute for actually sending an email to someone you know and care about.
And a joke is one thing. Too many people get too much of their news from unsubstantiated internet sources. Too many people pass these things on as fact. Too many people don't check the validity of things they receive in email.
While driving past a Target store a few years ago, my father, a retired Air Force veteran remarked that he wouldn't shop at Target anymore because they didn't support veterans' causes. He went on to say that Target was owned by a French company and that was why they wouldn't support US veterans.
I immediately knew this wasn't right. I had lived in the Minneapolis area and new that the Dayton/Target/Hudson corporation is not French owned, but a Minnesota company. I asked my father where he got this information and he said he had gotten it from a friend in the email. This friend sends him around 50 pieces of crap every week (I'm guessing, I haven't really counted, but it seems like a lot) that he forwards from other people.
So I did a little checking on my own. I encourage you to read the Snopes.com piece (Snopes is a GREAT resource for this kind of thing). It was simply a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that the man who made the initial claim has since tried to clear up. But it made it to the 'net, has been embelished and continues to exist even though there is very little basis in fact.
Here's what I do and I encourage everyone else to do. When I receive crap like this in my email, I check it out at Snopes.com. If I find the email to be false or misleading, I send and email to everyone that it was sent to, informing them of this, include the Snopes link and ask that everyone send the correct information to anyone they forwarded the false information to. I also ask that the person who forwarded the crap to me to send the information back to the person they received it from.
It takes no more effort to pass on the truth than it does to pass on this often hurtful lies. I use this case as simply an example, we all know that other untrue crap is passed on, that too many people accept the untrue as fact.
Sadly, no one seems to do this. Sadly, I still get this shit in my inbox. It doesn't have to be like this. We can get to the truth, we can use the internet, we can use our email for good.
Let's do it.
BOJ
At dinner there was some discussion about what an email is. Literally, it would be any electronic mail, no matter what the content. So, literally, spam would qualify as email. It's electronically generated, often sent to every possible email address. It's certainly not personal. I get stuff about AARP membership, about refinancing my mortgage or about how to make my 'johnson' longer. I'm not a senior, I don't own a home and my 'johnson' is just fine, thank you. None of that is for me. It's analogous to junk mail of the 'snail' variety.
Why do we get so much spam? I really haven't looked too much into it, but my guess would be that it costs virtually nothing to send millions of emails detailing the wonders of your product of business. Think about it, to do the same thing through the postal service would incur printing costs for the ad and would incur huge costs for postage. Email is so much more efficient, so efficient that as a spammer, you don't care if your message will be instantly deleted by 99% of the people who receive it.
We do the same thing with jokes or stupid photos we receive via email. You receive something via email, get a chuckle out of it and pass it on. Why do you pass it on? Because it doesn't cost you anything to do and requires very little effort on your part to do so.
You would never think of taking some of the postal junk mail you receive, placing it in an envelope, addressing it to a friend or loved one, applying proper postage and sending it on. You probably wouldn't do that with a joke a friend mailed to you using the good old US Mail. Both would take effort on your part and a minimum expenditure for postage. Let's face it, you probably wouldn't do it.
When someone forwards you a joke they received via email, does it qualify as email. I'm not talking literally anymore, I mean does it qualify as correspondence? Is there anything that sending a forwarded joke onto someone (or many people) you know (or don't know) provide a substitute for actual human contact?
I would say no. Forwarding something you received via email, something written by someone else, something that essentially took you absolutely NO effort to send on IN NO WAY provides a substitute for actually sending an email to someone you know and care about.
And a joke is one thing. Too many people get too much of their news from unsubstantiated internet sources. Too many people pass these things on as fact. Too many people don't check the validity of things they receive in email.
While driving past a Target store a few years ago, my father, a retired Air Force veteran remarked that he wouldn't shop at Target anymore because they didn't support veterans' causes. He went on to say that Target was owned by a French company and that was why they wouldn't support US veterans.
I immediately knew this wasn't right. I had lived in the Minneapolis area and new that the Dayton/Target/Hudson corporation is not French owned, but a Minnesota company. I asked my father where he got this information and he said he had gotten it from a friend in the email. This friend sends him around 50 pieces of crap every week (I'm guessing, I haven't really counted, but it seems like a lot) that he forwards from other people.
So I did a little checking on my own. I encourage you to read the Snopes.com piece (Snopes is a GREAT resource for this kind of thing). It was simply a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that the man who made the initial claim has since tried to clear up. But it made it to the 'net, has been embelished and continues to exist even though there is very little basis in fact.
Here's what I do and I encourage everyone else to do. When I receive crap like this in my email, I check it out at Snopes.com. If I find the email to be false or misleading, I send and email to everyone that it was sent to, informing them of this, include the Snopes link and ask that everyone send the correct information to anyone they forwarded the false information to. I also ask that the person who forwarded the crap to me to send the information back to the person they received it from.
It takes no more effort to pass on the truth than it does to pass on this often hurtful lies. I use this case as simply an example, we all know that other untrue crap is passed on, that too many people accept the untrue as fact.
Sadly, no one seems to do this. Sadly, I still get this shit in my inbox. It doesn't have to be like this. We can get to the truth, we can use the internet, we can use our email for good.
Let's do it.
BOJ
# posted by Blind Orange Julius @ 9:46 AM 
