Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The Acceptance of White Noise
Getting a group message from a friend that may not be relevant to you is becoming more common. Since the message is being sent from a friend, it would not be fair to call these messages spam. However, often these messages are what you could call white noise. Twitter has popularized this network-oriented communication system. A sender might need some help and will tweet out the request to their circle of friends. Some in the group may respond, but for the others, the message is ignored. This is the inherent nature of these one-to-many communication systems. The fact that Twitter and now Pownce are what the cool kids are using to stay in touch with their friends is interesting. Gen Y have been accustomed to instant accesss (mobile phones and IM). Twitter and Pownce have enhanced the always available communication expectations of this group. For better or worse, you are never out of sync with your posse.
We have been conditioned to throw away junk mail without opening it, let phone calls go to voice mail, and leave email unread unless they are urgent. Many using Twitter already opt to have the messages go to IM instead of their phones via text messaging. Sadly our last bastion of privacy, our mobile phones, are now begining to get clogged with spam text. Such is life.
Getting a group message from a friend that may not be relevant to you is becoming more common. Since the message is being sent from a friend, it would not be fair to call these messages spam. However, often these messages are what you could call white noise. Twitter has popularized this network-oriented communication system. A sender might need some help and will tweet out the request to their circle of friends. Some in the group may respond, but for the others, the message is ignored. This is the inherent nature of these one-to-many communication systems. The fact that Twitter and now Pownce are what the cool kids are using to stay in touch with their friends is interesting. Gen Y have been accustomed to instant accesss (mobile phones and IM). Twitter and Pownce have enhanced the always available communication expectations of this group. For better or worse, you are never out of sync with your posse.We have been conditioned to throw away junk mail without opening it, let phone calls go to voice mail, and leave email unread unless they are urgent. Many using Twitter already opt to have the messages go to IM instead of their phones via text messaging. Sadly our last bastion of privacy, our mobile phones, are now begining to get clogged with spam text. Such is life.
It used to be that when you only had 25MB of storage w/ Yahoo! Mail that managing spam was a frustrating and losing battle. Thanks to the storage wars Gmail started, storage space is no longer an issue. There are still some older folks who get insanely mad with all the spam, but mostly people just highlight and delete any such mail without much of a thought. Right now, a spam text message can cost a user money and can also eat up the microscopic storage capability of their phone. As our phones become more robust and data plans drop, a side effect will be a flood of spam and white noise messages. It may not be such a bad thing though. Case in point is the Blackberry. As is well documented, Blackberry users have to deal with spam, yet still are passionate and addicted to these mobile marvels.
Labels: blackberry, spam, twitter, white noise
¶ 7:53 PM
