Saturday, December 12, 2009
E-mail Alerts!
I received a message earlier this week from a well-meaning friend. The main thrust of the message was that the truth-checkers at www.snopes.com had determined that almost every single e-mail you receive that admonishes you to, “Forward this on to 10 (or some number) of your friends, sign this petition, or you’ll get bad luck, you’ll see something funny on your screen after you send it, or similar endings” contains a hidden e-mail tracker program attached that tracks emails and cookies of the folks to whom you forward the message.
The same is true of those obnoxious messages that shame you into forwarding something about God, or Jesus, or some other religious or political cause. They all contain some form of tracker that can later be used to spam you or your friends and family.
I know, those messages take us all in, even when we promise ourselves that we will cease and desist from ever forwarding them again. I try to follow a rule that I keep any of those things I’m tempted to forward for at least 24-hours before I send them on, and that does eliminate about 50 percent or more of them on review.
Well, when I decided to write this column, I wanted to make it light and somewhat funny, so I’m not going to preach to you. Instead, I’m going to republish an article that I first ran into about two years ago. It was written by a guy named Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California—or at least he was one when he wrote the column.
Before I get into the meat of the article, I have a few observations. (Was that a pun? Astronomer-observations. Hmmm?)
1. What parent nowadays names their son Seth?
2. Astronomers must have a lot of time to waste during the day.
3. It’s much easier to give credit and copy than it is to compose a column; less thinking, you know.
Okay, having said that, here is the work of Mr. Shostak. I’ll add a few comments of my own at the end or the piece.
You Call This Progress?
By Seth Shostak
Newsweek, January 18, 1999
E-mail has become a steady drip of dubious prose, bad jokes and impatient requests. It's as ubiquitous as winter damp, a pernicious miasma that brings rot and ruin to society's delicate underpinnings. I speak of e-mail, the greatest threat to civilization since lead dinnerware addled the brains of the Roman aristocracy.
A technical byproduct of the Internet, e-mail lets 10 million Americans pound out correspondence faster than you can say QWERTY. One twitch of the finger is all it takes to dispatch missives to the next continent or the next cubicle at light speed. The result is a flood of what is loosely called communication, a tsunami of bytes that is threatening to drown white-collar workers everywhere. Masquerading as a better way to put everyone in touch, e-mail has become an incessant distraction, a nonstop obligation and a sure source of stress and anxiety. I expect that a public statement by the surgeon general is in the offing.
Mind you, e-mail started out cute and cuddly, an inoffensive spin-off from a government defense project. The technically inclined used it to send personal messages to colleagues without the need for a stamp or a wait. Only a small group of folks—mostly at universities—were plugged in to this select network. The amount of traffic was manageable. E-mail was something to be checked every week or so. But technology marches on. Today access to the Internet is widespread, as common and accessible as a cheap motel. Everyone's wired, and everyone has something to say.
Unfortunately, this is not polite correspondence, the gentle art of letter writing in electronic form. E-mail is aggressive. It has a built-in, insistent arrogance. Because it arrives more or less instantaneously, the assumption is that you will deal with it quickly. "Quickly" might mean minutes, or possibly hours. Certainly not days. Failure to respond directly usually produces a second missive sporting the mildly critical plaint, "Didn't you get my last e-mail?" This imperative for the immediate makes me yearn for old-style written communication, in which a week might lapse between inquiry and response. Questions and discussion could be considered in depth. A reply could be considered (or mentally shelved, depending on circumstance). Today, however, all is knee-jerk reaction.
In addition, there is the dismaying fact that electronically generated mail, despite being easy to edit, is usually prose at its worst. Of every 10 e-mails I read, nine suffer from major spelling faults, convoluted grammar and a stunning lack of logical organization. ASCII graffiti. For years I assumed this was an inevitable byproduct of the low student test scores so regularly lamented in newspaper editorials. Johnny can't read, so it's not surprising that he can't write either. But now I believe that the reason for all this unimpressive prose is something else: e-mail has made correspondents of folks who would otherwise never compose a text. It encourages messaging because it is relatively anonymous. The shy, the introverted and the socially inept can all hunker down before a glowing computer and whisper to the world. This is not the telephone, with its brutally personal, audible contact. It's not the post, for which an actual sheet of paper, touched by the writer and displaying his imperfect calligraphic skills, will end up under the nose of the recipient. E-mails are surreptitiously thrown over an electronic transom in the dead of night, packaged in plain manila envelopes.
Still, it is not these esthetic debilities that make e-mail such a threat. Rather, it's the unstoppable proliferation. Like the brooms unleashed by the sorcerer's apprentice, e-mails are beginning to overwhelm those who use them. Electronic correspondence is not one to one. It is one to many, and that's bad news on the receiving end. The ease with which copies of any correspondence can be dispensed to the world ensures that I am "kept informed" of my co-workers' every move. Such bureaucratic banter was once held in check by the technical limitations of carbon paper. Now my colleagues just punch a plastic mouse to ensure my exposure to their thoughts, their plans and the endless missives that supposedly prove that they're doing their jobs.
Because of e-mail's many-tentacled reach, its practitioners hardly care whether I'm around or not. I'm just another address in a list. So the deluge of digital correspondence continues irrespective of whether I'm sitting in my cubicle doing the boss's business or lying on the Côte d'Azur squeezing sand through my toes. Either way the e-mail, like a horde of motivated Mongolians, just keeps a-comin'. Vacations have lost their allure, and I hesitate to leave town. Consider: if I disappear for two weeks of rest and recreation, I can be sure of confronting screenfuls of e-mail upon my return. It's enough to make a grown man groan. The alternative is to take a laptop computer along, in the desperate hope of keeping up with e-mail's steady drip, drip, drip. Needless to say, there's something unholy about answering e-mails from your holiday suite. A friend recently told me that he can't afford to die: the e-mail would pile up and nobody could handle it.
Today I will receive 50 electronic messages. Of that number, at least half require a reply. (Many of the others consist of jokes, irrelevant bulletins and important announcements about secret cookie recipes. I actually like getting such junk e-mails, as they allow the pleasure of a quick delete without guilt.) If I spend five minutes considering and composing a response to each correspondence, then two hours of my day are busied with e-mail, even if I don't initiate a single one. Since the number of Internet users is doubling about once a year, I expect that by the start of the new millennium, I—and millions like me—will be doing nothing but writing e-mails. The collapse of commerce and polite society will quickly follow.
I'm as much in favor of technology as the next guy. Personally, I think the Luddites should have welcomed the steam looms. But if you insist on telling me that e-mail is an advance, do me a favor and use the phone.
Okay, on to my remarks… Did you note the date of that missive? Ten years have elapsed since Seth wrote that piece of vitriolic verse, and his prediction for the millennium notwithstanding, we have survived the onslaught of exponential increase in electronic mail. I don’t know about you, but the first thing I do in the morning, even before I get my first cup of coffee, is check my e-mail. And there are usually a dozen or more of the messages waiting for me. (One of my buddies is a night owl, and I can always tell when he’s been hitting the sauce, too.)
I share some of the author’s complaints, especially those about the grammar and spelling. Every e-mail template has a spell-checker and most will even detect fragmented and awkward sentence structure. Yet, much of the mail I receive has numerous typos, misspellings and meaningless phrases that masquerade as prose. You will not find that in mine if I can help it, I promise you.
However, having put all that down, I still enjoy seeing a full Inbox. I don’t even mind when I get the same joke for the umpteenth time, or when the message promises to reward or punish me, based on my willingness to forward it to 7—have you noticed that 7 is the magic number—of my closest friends and confidants. I always take great pleasure in hitting the ‘Delete’ key on those.
Finally, though I know that Mr. Shostak was annoyed, I also detect some great humor in his lament. I suspect that, like you and me, he would be disappointed if he went to his PC some day and there was not a single e-mail message waiting for his perusal. Let’s face it, we’re social animals, and we love attention no matter how we get it.
The same is true of those obnoxious messages that shame you into forwarding something about God, or Jesus, or some other religious or political cause. They all contain some form of tracker that can later be used to spam you or your friends and family.
I know, those messages take us all in, even when we promise ourselves that we will cease and desist from ever forwarding them again. I try to follow a rule that I keep any of those things I’m tempted to forward for at least 24-hours before I send them on, and that does eliminate about 50 percent or more of them on review.
Well, when I decided to write this column, I wanted to make it light and somewhat funny, so I’m not going to preach to you. Instead, I’m going to republish an article that I first ran into about two years ago. It was written by a guy named Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California—or at least he was one when he wrote the column.
Before I get into the meat of the article, I have a few observations. (Was that a pun? Astronomer-observations. Hmmm?)
1. What parent nowadays names their son Seth?
2. Astronomers must have a lot of time to waste during the day.
3. It’s much easier to give credit and copy than it is to compose a column; less thinking, you know.
Okay, having said that, here is the work of Mr. Shostak. I’ll add a few comments of my own at the end or the piece.
You Call This Progress?
By Seth Shostak
Newsweek, January 18, 1999
E-mail has become a steady drip of dubious prose, bad jokes and impatient requests. It's as ubiquitous as winter damp, a pernicious miasma that brings rot and ruin to society's delicate underpinnings. I speak of e-mail, the greatest threat to civilization since lead dinnerware addled the brains of the Roman aristocracy.
A technical byproduct of the Internet, e-mail lets 10 million Americans pound out correspondence faster than you can say QWERTY. One twitch of the finger is all it takes to dispatch missives to the next continent or the next cubicle at light speed. The result is a flood of what is loosely called communication, a tsunami of bytes that is threatening to drown white-collar workers everywhere. Masquerading as a better way to put everyone in touch, e-mail has become an incessant distraction, a nonstop obligation and a sure source of stress and anxiety. I expect that a public statement by the surgeon general is in the offing.
Mind you, e-mail started out cute and cuddly, an inoffensive spin-off from a government defense project. The technically inclined used it to send personal messages to colleagues without the need for a stamp or a wait. Only a small group of folks—mostly at universities—were plugged in to this select network. The amount of traffic was manageable. E-mail was something to be checked every week or so. But technology marches on. Today access to the Internet is widespread, as common and accessible as a cheap motel. Everyone's wired, and everyone has something to say.
Unfortunately, this is not polite correspondence, the gentle art of letter writing in electronic form. E-mail is aggressive. It has a built-in, insistent arrogance. Because it arrives more or less instantaneously, the assumption is that you will deal with it quickly. "Quickly" might mean minutes, or possibly hours. Certainly not days. Failure to respond directly usually produces a second missive sporting the mildly critical plaint, "Didn't you get my last e-mail?" This imperative for the immediate makes me yearn for old-style written communication, in which a week might lapse between inquiry and response. Questions and discussion could be considered in depth. A reply could be considered (or mentally shelved, depending on circumstance). Today, however, all is knee-jerk reaction.
In addition, there is the dismaying fact that electronically generated mail, despite being easy to edit, is usually prose at its worst. Of every 10 e-mails I read, nine suffer from major spelling faults, convoluted grammar and a stunning lack of logical organization. ASCII graffiti. For years I assumed this was an inevitable byproduct of the low student test scores so regularly lamented in newspaper editorials. Johnny can't read, so it's not surprising that he can't write either. But now I believe that the reason for all this unimpressive prose is something else: e-mail has made correspondents of folks who would otherwise never compose a text. It encourages messaging because it is relatively anonymous. The shy, the introverted and the socially inept can all hunker down before a glowing computer and whisper to the world. This is not the telephone, with its brutally personal, audible contact. It's not the post, for which an actual sheet of paper, touched by the writer and displaying his imperfect calligraphic skills, will end up under the nose of the recipient. E-mails are surreptitiously thrown over an electronic transom in the dead of night, packaged in plain manila envelopes.
Still, it is not these esthetic debilities that make e-mail such a threat. Rather, it's the unstoppable proliferation. Like the brooms unleashed by the sorcerer's apprentice, e-mails are beginning to overwhelm those who use them. Electronic correspondence is not one to one. It is one to many, and that's bad news on the receiving end. The ease with which copies of any correspondence can be dispensed to the world ensures that I am "kept informed" of my co-workers' every move. Such bureaucratic banter was once held in check by the technical limitations of carbon paper. Now my colleagues just punch a plastic mouse to ensure my exposure to their thoughts, their plans and the endless missives that supposedly prove that they're doing their jobs.
Because of e-mail's many-tentacled reach, its practitioners hardly care whether I'm around or not. I'm just another address in a list. So the deluge of digital correspondence continues irrespective of whether I'm sitting in my cubicle doing the boss's business or lying on the Côte d'Azur squeezing sand through my toes. Either way the e-mail, like a horde of motivated Mongolians, just keeps a-comin'. Vacations have lost their allure, and I hesitate to leave town. Consider: if I disappear for two weeks of rest and recreation, I can be sure of confronting screenfuls of e-mail upon my return. It's enough to make a grown man groan. The alternative is to take a laptop computer along, in the desperate hope of keeping up with e-mail's steady drip, drip, drip. Needless to say, there's something unholy about answering e-mails from your holiday suite. A friend recently told me that he can't afford to die: the e-mail would pile up and nobody could handle it.
Today I will receive 50 electronic messages. Of that number, at least half require a reply. (Many of the others consist of jokes, irrelevant bulletins and important announcements about secret cookie recipes. I actually like getting such junk e-mails, as they allow the pleasure of a quick delete without guilt.) If I spend five minutes considering and composing a response to each correspondence, then two hours of my day are busied with e-mail, even if I don't initiate a single one. Since the number of Internet users is doubling about once a year, I expect that by the start of the new millennium, I—and millions like me—will be doing nothing but writing e-mails. The collapse of commerce and polite society will quickly follow.
I'm as much in favor of technology as the next guy. Personally, I think the Luddites should have welcomed the steam looms. But if you insist on telling me that e-mail is an advance, do me a favor and use the phone.
Okay, on to my remarks… Did you note the date of that missive? Ten years have elapsed since Seth wrote that piece of vitriolic verse, and his prediction for the millennium notwithstanding, we have survived the onslaught of exponential increase in electronic mail. I don’t know about you, but the first thing I do in the morning, even before I get my first cup of coffee, is check my e-mail. And there are usually a dozen or more of the messages waiting for me. (One of my buddies is a night owl, and I can always tell when he’s been hitting the sauce, too.)
I share some of the author’s complaints, especially those about the grammar and spelling. Every e-mail template has a spell-checker and most will even detect fragmented and awkward sentence structure. Yet, much of the mail I receive has numerous typos, misspellings and meaningless phrases that masquerade as prose. You will not find that in mine if I can help it, I promise you.
However, having put all that down, I still enjoy seeing a full Inbox. I don’t even mind when I get the same joke for the umpteenth time, or when the message promises to reward or punish me, based on my willingness to forward it to 7—have you noticed that 7 is the magic number—of my closest friends and confidants. I always take great pleasure in hitting the ‘Delete’ key on those.
Finally, though I know that Mr. Shostak was annoyed, I also detect some great humor in his lament. I suspect that, like you and me, he would be disappointed if he went to his PC some day and there was not a single e-mail message waiting for his perusal. Let’s face it, we’re social animals, and we love attention no matter how we get it.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
The End Must Be Near
I don’t usually publish a column in the middle of the week, but wait until Saturday to send my weekly words. However, this is too interesting to hold in suspense, and I have a topic for Saturday’s column anyway. I just have to get this out now.
December is shaping up to be a pretty interesting month for the world. I try my best not to show too much emotion (laughing or crying or screaming and cursing) but it is becoming increasingly difficult.
Let me see if I can recap what has occurred so far…
Someone hacked into some computers of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia—sounds like some outpost in Outer Mongolia to me—and discovered some very damaging and embarrassing e-mails that seem to make the whole topic of global warming a farce and a cover-up. Not only do the “scientists” input junk for effect, they collaborate on which junk to include and how to doctor the results to make it seem more compelling to their case.
As if that wasn’t enough, our own Environmental Protection Agency issued an edict that carbon dioxide is definitely a poison, and we humans are in mortal danger from it. Now, I don’t know about you, but every time I exhale a breath, it consists of carbon dioxide. That means that I am poisoning the very air I breathe. I am also guilty of poisoning your air too, but then, if you are at all similar to me, you’re also poisoning my air.
What a field day for the lawyers this new discovery will make!! We can all sue each other for millions, and when I die, my relatives can have all of you arrested and charged with murder. Well, maybe they can do it selectively, and I’ll have my will written to include only those whom I want charged with the crime.
On that same topic, most of our vegetation on this planet consumes and thrives on carbon dioxide. If we humans are going to make it a crime to produce it, then I think there is a need for some beneficent group to come to the aid of plant life. Maybe it could be known as “People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants” (PETP). It would be similar to PETA, and I’m sure some of those same people would join and defend the trees.
Oh wait! We already have a society for preservation of the trees, the Sierra Club. Well, maybe they could take up the cause.
Our Congress is in hot and heavy debate on the government takeover of our health care, and they are now meeting on Sundays, even though our Constitution specifically forbids it. (Constitution, what Constitution? We don’t need no stinking Constitution!) Just for reference, Congress never called a Sunday meeting even during our most horrendous days in WWII.
Here’s another nugget… President Obama is claiming credit for “reducing our deficit” by not spending $200 billion of the $787 billion in TARP money. Let me see if I really understand that. Our economy tanked and Obama pumped $787 additional dollars that we didn’t have into the debt total to “save” the nation. Then, when it became evident that only three-fourths of that debt was spent—without saving anything, by the way—he said that we could “reduce the deficit” by not spending the rest. Hmmm, that seems logical.
But wait, it gets even better. Now the president wants to “spend the rest” to get the economy moving again. Wait a minute! I’m confused. How do you reduce the deficit by spending money that you don’t really have, but that you just said you saved?
I’m not done yet. In his now infamous speech at West Point, our Commander-in-Chief outlined his plan to increase our troop strength in Afghanistan by 30,000—General McChrystal asked for 40-60,000 four months ago—while at the same time and in the same breath announcing a withdrawal of all forces beginning in July of 2011.
Let’s see, he’s going to put 30,000 more troops in harm’s way for eighteen months, during which some will inevitably be injured or killed, but they are not promised any justification for their sacrifice. The goal is certainly not victory.
I’m srry, I cn’t typ enymre cuse I cant sei vry wll. Im laugng and cryng to hrd, nd thetears ar blrring my vsion.
December is shaping up to be a pretty interesting month for the world. I try my best not to show too much emotion (laughing or crying or screaming and cursing) but it is becoming increasingly difficult.
Let me see if I can recap what has occurred so far…
Someone hacked into some computers of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia—sounds like some outpost in Outer Mongolia to me—and discovered some very damaging and embarrassing e-mails that seem to make the whole topic of global warming a farce and a cover-up. Not only do the “scientists” input junk for effect, they collaborate on which junk to include and how to doctor the results to make it seem more compelling to their case.
As if that wasn’t enough, our own Environmental Protection Agency issued an edict that carbon dioxide is definitely a poison, and we humans are in mortal danger from it. Now, I don’t know about you, but every time I exhale a breath, it consists of carbon dioxide. That means that I am poisoning the very air I breathe. I am also guilty of poisoning your air too, but then, if you are at all similar to me, you’re also poisoning my air.
What a field day for the lawyers this new discovery will make!! We can all sue each other for millions, and when I die, my relatives can have all of you arrested and charged with murder. Well, maybe they can do it selectively, and I’ll have my will written to include only those whom I want charged with the crime.
On that same topic, most of our vegetation on this planet consumes and thrives on carbon dioxide. If we humans are going to make it a crime to produce it, then I think there is a need for some beneficent group to come to the aid of plant life. Maybe it could be known as “People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants” (PETP). It would be similar to PETA, and I’m sure some of those same people would join and defend the trees.
Oh wait! We already have a society for preservation of the trees, the Sierra Club. Well, maybe they could take up the cause.
Our Congress is in hot and heavy debate on the government takeover of our health care, and they are now meeting on Sundays, even though our Constitution specifically forbids it. (Constitution, what Constitution? We don’t need no stinking Constitution!) Just for reference, Congress never called a Sunday meeting even during our most horrendous days in WWII.
Here’s another nugget… President Obama is claiming credit for “reducing our deficit” by not spending $200 billion of the $787 billion in TARP money. Let me see if I really understand that. Our economy tanked and Obama pumped $787 additional dollars that we didn’t have into the debt total to “save” the nation. Then, when it became evident that only three-fourths of that debt was spent—without saving anything, by the way—he said that we could “reduce the deficit” by not spending the rest. Hmmm, that seems logical.
But wait, it gets even better. Now the president wants to “spend the rest” to get the economy moving again. Wait a minute! I’m confused. How do you reduce the deficit by spending money that you don’t really have, but that you just said you saved?
I’m not done yet. In his now infamous speech at West Point, our Commander-in-Chief outlined his plan to increase our troop strength in Afghanistan by 30,000—General McChrystal asked for 40-60,000 four months ago—while at the same time and in the same breath announcing a withdrawal of all forces beginning in July of 2011.
Let’s see, he’s going to put 30,000 more troops in harm’s way for eighteen months, during which some will inevitably be injured or killed, but they are not promised any justification for their sacrifice. The goal is certainly not victory.
I’m srry, I cn’t typ enymre cuse I cant sei vry wll. Im laugng and cryng to hrd, nd thetears ar blrring my vsion.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)