Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

14 Apr 2010, 17:28 p.m.

My Lawn And The Children Upon It

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

The amazing penetration of the Do-Not-Call list and cell phones means that kids growing up in the US these days will never know how annoying telemarketers used to be. They also won't know how pervasive those AOL floppies and CDs were. And as Leonard points out, since they all use GMail, they'll never know how bad spam used to be.

Comments

Avram Grumer
http://agrumer.livejournal.com/
14 Apr 2010, 21:34 p.m.

On the other hand, certain companies have succeeded in convincing my own friends to spam me via Twitter.

Martin
17 Apr 2010, 14:47 p.m.

It seems unrealistic to think that spam will ever go away. Postal spam is as common as it ever was. Phone spam is on the decline at the moment thanks to legislation, but legislation can change. Filtering is getting better at handling email spam, but spammers are nothing if not adaptable. Comment spam is currently a 'net-wide plague, though at the moment it's generally true that a well-designed comment form will stop most spammers, because of the don't-outrun-the-bear principle. SMS spam, Twitter spam, and other new channels are being invented every day. Today's kids will be used to a whole new world of grey advertising.

LEELA<br/>Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?<br/> <br/>FRY<br/>Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written in the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!