I accidentally clicked “mark as spam” on an email I received today so I went into my gmail spam folder to retrieve it, needless to say I was little shocked when I saw the amount of spam I was receiving (not to mention the type of spam). Here’s a screenshot of a few spam messages from this morning:
I love the “woman wants your python” and “drilling machine” emails, they actually made me laugh out loud. There’s an important lesson in all the spam crap we get out there and that’s the ability to filter information that we receive. I can’t imagine what my inbox would look like if these spam messages weren’t filtered out.
As more people continue to join the web and as we continue to expand our online presence by joining more social networks, we also continue to give out more information about ourselves. This means that instead of someone just being able to find my email on this site that they can also find it through myspace, facebook, twitter (which links here), etc. Thus far I think technology has been able to do a pretty good job at filtering information for us, almost too good.
We rely quite a lot on automatic filtering, almost to the point where we have lost the ability to filter information ourselves. We rely on other tools and platforms to tell us what’s important and the human aspect is disappearing. I think this is one of the main reasons why so many people complain about information overload. It’s not always that we have too much information coming our way, it’s that we have lost the ability to filter that information on our own.
It can be argued that we are getting better at filtering information since there is so much more of it now, however with the increase of information comes more effecient filtering tools and algorithms.
What are your thoughts on this?
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