> One of the chief problems is that newbie users and light users of the
> Internet will constantly see their email boxes filling up with spam and
> they will decide that the Internet is not worth their time. This means
> that those of us who are building or who have built alternatives on the
> Internet will see our reach gradually diminished.
>
> I don't have anything to back this up, but I suspect that the amount of
> spam has prompted some activists to use the Internet less, which has
> serious implications for activists who use the Internet to communicate
> and organize.
Perhaps we could start an educational campaign to combat this danger. For example, one could compare spam to the condition of city streets in the old days, when people threw their garbage into them and horse shit was everywhere, but that didn't stop folks from using them for transportation purposes. We could hold out the hope that eventually the Internet equivalent of the internal combustion engine and landfills will be developed, so that the kind of pollution we call "spam" will be replaced with another, less grossly offensive, kind.
But aside from the specific question of spam, I have noticed that a lot of my lefty acquaintances seem to be a bit intimidated by computers and therefore unfortunately fail to take advantage of all of their capabilities. E.g., they use word processors, but haven't learned how to change fonts, so everything they write is in the default font. Partly, this is because the darned machines (even Macs) still retain a lot of their techie origins, when only highly trained professional computer operators laid hands on them. Perhaps it is also because lefties tend to be "people-people," not "machine-people." It would be great if someone started a computer school for computer-shy activists.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org _____________________________________ "Apparently if you play a Windows CD backwards you hear satanic messages. You think that's bad? If you play it forwards it installs Windows!" -- Random bit of wisdom from the Net