Stop Spamming! (I mean advertising.)
I was perusing Facebook today, and I saw sponsored post for a cool concert in Michigan.
The post had 100+ likes, and two comments.One comment was from an angry Facebook user annoyed that a sponsored post was in their news feed. He wrote “stop spamming!”
It made me pause.
We’ve crossed into odd, digital territory, as consumers, artists and marketers.
In the 1990s, we knew what spam looked like: “Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients, usually through email.” Usually trying to scam us.
See how the word rose into our lexicon on this Google Graph. Once social media became the rage, as did chase for clicks and numbers, the idea of spam morphed.
So what is Spam now?
Clearly, a sponsored post on Facebook is neither “irrelevant” (at least according to Facebook’s algorithm) or inappropriate (according to the terms of the Facebook contract we agree to by using the site).
Yet people may feel annoyed when they see ads; but not everyone will feel the same type of annoyance at the same time…
I propose that the word, spam, also symbolizes our annoyance with advertising. Our society is overloaded, and with that, our patience, diminished.
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