A few years ago, before the advent of the federal Do Not Call list, I met an earnest young person who worked as a telemarketer, in the comments section of a political blog.  I'll call this person Mary Din (not her real name). She'd had no luck finding a job that was a match for her background and skills, so she'd joined a telemarketing company. The conversation didn't touch on the ethics or propriety of telemarketing, but rather civility: one of the most distasteful aspect of her job was that some people were rude, even abusive, to her when she called, occasionally so much so that it brought her to tears.

"Maybe you were interrupting something important."

"But I couldn't know that," said Mary.

"There are Do No Call lists you could have looked at," I said. (And at the time there were such, in some states.)

"Yes, but I don't have control over which numbers get called. The company makes that decision."

"Why do you work for a company that cares so little about the people they bother?"

"I'm just trying to make a living," said Mary. "Some people do want to talk to me. The others can just ask me not to call again. Without being rude--I'm a human being."

"But someone might be receiving hundreds of calls a year from people just like you. Doesn't that make a difference? Personally, though I'm always polite on the phone, I think it's fine for others to be rude, if they like. The more awful a job being a telemarketer is, the fewer people will do it."

Predictably, some others in the discussion thought I was an asshole in taking this hard line. Perhaps I was. And perhaps I am. But I believe that telemarketers are breaking an implicit social contract, one that involves taking the time to figure out whether you're going to bother someone or not before you do it. That's rude. It's reasonable (though a personal decision) to be rude in response.

Spam is a term first applied in the computer world to the practice of disrupting an online forum with a flood of text [thanks to MarkinKentuckiana for a correction here], and soon grew to encompass unsolicited commercial bulk email. It's an interesting outgrowth of the economics of the Internet. Unlike regular postal mail, in which the sender bears the cost of sending physical letters and package, email is just another way to transfer data between computers over the Internet, and that data transfer cost is shared by everyone (to a first approximation). The upshot is that it's very, very cheap to send mail from an account on one computer to millions of accounts on other computers. It's been estimated that some 97% of email messages are unsolicited mail. Basically, spam.

Of course, most of us don't have to deal with this deluge directly. We have spam filters on our email accounts that do a very good job of eliminating unwanted messages. We're still paying to receive this messages, either directly in the cost of downloading information from the Internet or indirectly in the price of an unlimited data connection. 

The World Wide Web has changed what we think of as spam, to some extent. Now we apply the term to blog posts and comments that have the purpose of selling product to readers who may or may not be interested. Usually not. But that doesn't matter to those who produce the spam. It only takes one person out of millions to respond for them to find the activity profitable. As with my telemarketing example, this is a social problem: Everyone's free to ignore spam, but as long as there are a few people who don't, even a tiny number, the activities of spammers will continue to bother everyone.

Should we care about spam on Open Salon? I can deal with it, as an individual, just by ignoring it. Some might be more bothered by it. But there are broader social aspects we might consider.

The first is a variation on the broken windows concept in law enforcement. The idea is that maintaining a building by fixing broken windows will limit the activities of vandals, squatters, and gangs who might make the problem worse. This idea isn't without criticism, but it's at least plausible: A neighborhood with decaying buildings simply doesn't look as inviting to visitors. In an online environment, spam is commonly seen as vandalism, and new visitors to a Web site, seeing a great deal of it, may be less likely to stay.

A second aspect is related to the perception of available resources. A few years ago I lived in an apartment in Venice, California, with an attached garage. Our car was regularly broken into by the homeless people who slept in the garage overnight. "Can't you fix the lock on the garage door?" I asked the manager. (I wasn't the only one, of course.) "We'll get to that, but it will be expensive," he'd say. A year went by... but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that my judgment of the apartment as a reasonable place to live was influenced by the resources the apartment manager was willing to put into upkeep. Similarly, when I visit a Web site and see a great deal of spam, I wonder about how long it will stay in business, if there are no resources to devote to writing or installing widely available mechanisms for spam prevention, basic maintenance. 

These are just a few general thoughts about spam, as I go off to make my lunch. Bon appetit!