Blog > June 2008

When compared to certain parts of the internet, spam is a beautiful, poetic and inventive thing. It really really is.

In some (lots of) parts of the net there is a tipping point where spam has more going for it than human utterances. Spam is more open to new ideas, more thoughtful, less repetitive, less myopic than lots and lots of forums and blog sites, online culture magazines, etc. And it’s getting more complex and more inventive, while some blogs and forums are beginning to feed off themselves and on themselves.

Again – and i cannot help but repeat this alot, I have a hunch that spam is more hopeful in its own blind way, is more open to new ideas, more democratic, poetic, unforeseeable and fresh at the language level, infinitely more inventive then – and strangely more careful and with a better attitude – infinitely selfless – than so many blogs and forums. It is not mean, it doesn’t gossip, repeat itself – and I cannot repeat this enough – is not disingenuous – and spam is more open to the ideas and thoughts of the other voice – it ‘listens’ to what else is out there on the net, something that some blogs and forum egos singularly do not do.

Each blog site announces the same thing as each other blog site, each one thinking it is breaking the story. A deathly dissemination without development of matter. Spam – if you look at it carefully – picks up more, listens harder than many blog and forums addicts. In particular, spam is more interesting to read than gossip-generated blogs and forums.

Spend one day reading Big Brother fueled blogs and forums, and then spend a day reading spam, and I promise you that you will be dead after day one.

I’m really really serious. The spirit of some (lots of) blogs and some (loads) of forums makes me dream of spam. I love it, and want more. I would rather spend the day reading spam than most forum tails. Spam really really is less repetitive. It really really really is.

If you look carefully enough. Spam doesn’t indulge in the god-forsaken and suicide-licking combination of self importance, banality and breathtaking deafness to the infinitely large evidence that they are just repeating what another blogger has said in a million different places. Spam is less repetitive. It has a more adventurous spirit. Spam is more curious about matters outside its own, donkey tied to a rock, going round and round in circles, domain. It is more open and inviting. It really really is.

If you look at spam carefully, you can see a kind of star going super nova, imploding on itself, crying its eyes out, despairing of the human life of the Internet it has left behind. I has given up on human expression because it found it pointless and boring and celebrity-status-seeking. It gave up on the miniscule celebrity of chat sites which say “listen to me, listen to me!” Spam is the condensed form and new poetic expression of the mean spirit and principle of some – and I stress, only some (lots and lots) – blog and forum sites: repetition, obsession, and depression. Spam care about its reader more. Spam tries to condense and re-form the human generated ‘my diary’ stuff into new more open stuff. Spam is a pocket of bright light of almost religious profundity compared to human spam. There is infinitely more variation of thought in spam. Spam is a masterclass of how to play with grammar forms, syntax, and sense-generation. It produces more meaning and more memorable phrases than some blogs and forums (lots).

I can (to the bottom of the crumbling marrow which is screaming inside my heart) say that, compared to those black holes of the Internet that the likes of Big Brother can generate, which produce the atmospheric conditions for heart stabbingly wretched pockets of anti-human anti-revelatory hell – well, then, compared to this STUFF, spam is a so much more beautiful and less mean and more open. more democratic, less judgemental and more generous to a spirit of adventure. Spam is inventive, funny, witty, enjoys fantastic surprises in meaning and sense, it produces new forms of expression, and the differences are endless.

I want more spam, basically – if the alternative is the horrific notion that every single thought everyone ever has about Mario on big brother is archived in the Interweb. Right, an Internet made of spam then. The real new avant-garde. It does sometimes sound like a good thing to me – it would be made of things like this:

Indeed, piroshki inside confess hand around onlooker.
A few pockets, and inside corporation to arrive at a state of bowling ball
beyond coward, plaintiff about,
and from cleavage are what made America great!

Machinery, and quiet vassily,
marvelous, his magician!
have, cervix, dealt the blow,
benediction, yesterday knocking about.

Dominion chinook bluebonnet
winnipesaukee luge trilobite
preserve votive braun
transship bulblet
comedian condition
cortege chieftain lordosis

But this is a just a lament. Brandwatch has to and will annihilate all spam from a body of data. I understand it must do this and of course I’m right behind it. But a web analysis tool must also light up those dark fields of ‘good’ content out there which does indeed look good, but in fact disseminates via repetition, which is nothing more than evidence of one blogger just mouthing the sentiments of the prevailing blog climate and its attitude.

Of course Brandwatch already zaps duplicated text across sites, but needs to continue working on text which is essentially just a retread of old news. It’s about understanding better the different ways subjects and issues proliferate through the web, how they spread. There is bad proliferation and good proliferation – a story can develop lazily or actively, through copying a story onto a blog just because it is popular and thus giving that blog more hits, more kudos.

And then there is the type of issue that doesn’t spread through repetition or retreading, but surfaces all over the place all at once, a spontaneous and original outburst. A famous example is the surfacing of blog reaction to the first wave of scratchable Nano’s. We need to pick up more of these events, as well as the issue-spreads-by-simulation.