NONE: Re: email or quality information?
Re: email or quality information?
Bob Schmidt (schmidt_at_magicnet.net)
Sun, 07 Jul 1996 05:39:55 -0400
Bruno Bloch says,
>Do you find advertising clipped under the wisher of your car frontwindow
>offensive? Do you find advertising dropped into your snail mailbox
>offensive?
>
>If your answer is no, then you have just a few more months to go until
>you feel comfortable with the current new media available and you will
>probably make use of direct e-mail advertising.
I have argued in favor of greater tolerance and believe Bruno's point
indicates a significant phenomenon. After all, it wasn't so long ago
(1950's) when everyone was gravely concerned about becoming a impersonal
"number" (this was even before we all worried about becoming a
"statistic."). In today's world with a multitude of phone numbers, credit
card numbers, frequent flyer numbers, etc. etc. how quaint it seems to think
the problem consists of one number, and how naive that we felt threatened by
a single number! Yet, our tolerance level is such that even dealing with so
many numbers is a matter of routine. We have adapted and integrated this
into our culture. Now we look forward to "one number" phone service that,
egad, knows our every move. Big Brother didn't die, he quit the government
and went to work for the phone company.
In McLuhan-esque terms, the new media are always percieved as threatening
and alienating, because they force us to turn our assumptions upside down
and inside out, to perceive differently. The new media are always first
understood in terms of the old media, thus we talk about web "pages" and
electronic "bulk mail". We are only just discovering how these new media
will transform the human experience.
Cliff Kurtzman writes,
>If it becomes more acceptable to send out unsolicited email ads, there is
>no similar mechanism to keep the level manageable. It will go exponential,
>just like many other aspects of the net have. If I go in to the office
>each day and need to sort through thousands of email ads just to get to my
>business correspondence, then I will no longer be able to use the Net to do
>my job. This is why I and so many others feel so strongly about this
>subject.
Uh, at the risk of stating the obvious, the scenario Cliff gives could be
easily compared to the telephone and the busy executive. While long
distance charges and outbound calls are costly, local calls do not present a
cost barrier. Many companies already employ a vast army of telemarkers. Why
then does every business not receive a telemarketing call from every other
business in town, every day?
[Note from Cliff/moderator: it is not similar IMHO -- the labor costs
associated with telemarketing are orders of magnitude higher, which keeps
it in balance.]
Or, perhaps you feel like you do *indeed* already receive too many
telemarketing calls and you have your secretary screen them because you
couldn't possibly run your business and take every one of them. There was a
time when secretaries did not take telephone calls. Of course, that was
before the telephone had been invented. How do you think companies felt when
they realized they would have to hire more people *just to answer the
telephone*? But there is absolutely no reason why the same gatekeeper for
other communication will not handle email correspondence as well. In the
future, you will either have a public email address and a private email
address (perhaps password protected receipt), or you will have someone
screen (and routinely reply) on your behalf and mostly likely all of this
will happen. Multiple email adresses will be as common as rotary lines.
Indeed, mailboxes may be configured to "roll over" in the same way.
Today, email is perceived as a personal environment, an intimate, inner
sanctum, indeed, a sanctum sanctorum, an extension of our most private
thoughts. All the complaints of the anitspammers basically boil down to
issues of violating (DE-personalizing) their "personal email space". Right
now they are "shell shocked." With time their tolerance level will increase
though some will adjust better than others. Some will find it an untolerable
environmnet and will have to go offline to maintain equilibrium.
Note that the hypersensitives are typically the long time Internet users who
have a frame of reference to compare with today's email environment. They
are the first Internet nostalgics, what McLuhan called looking at the future
in a rear view mirror-- they harken back to the good old days of the
Internet and are determined to bring it back. There is, of course, no way to
do that. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and will not be put back in.
The fact is, everyone gets more email today than ever before, email of all
types, personal and commercial, "solicited" and unsolicited, and it will
only increase. The antispammers ask how will they handle 1,000 bulk emails a
day. To which I reply, how do you know it will happen?
Perhaps the better reply, and the more likely scenario is, how will you
handle the 1,000 "solicited" emails you will soon be receiving? I already
wade through almost that many now, between 5 online services and numerous
listserves. 99% of all of it -- less than 2/10ths of 1 percent is spam --
gets the delete key-- and that's *after* I read it, not before. A couple of
bulk emails, a couple hundred bulk emails a day, I wouldn't even notice.
I've dealt with this for more than 5 years. If I had to get all worked up
and retaliate against every instance of excess, abuse, flaming, spam and
just plain stupidity I've come across in just the last week alone, they
would have to put me in straight jacket.
Bob Schmidt
Provider Marketing Group
Orlando Florida
