when is SPAM just canned meat?
when is SPAM just canned meat?
the fat being chewed lately around the Emp Ave water cooler is about the forced departure of a player – one loved by many, and obviously hated by some others – for allegedly “spamming” on a connected social media site.
along with that conversation arises another discussion – what is SPAM? – and derivatives about whether it was SPAM or possibly another brand of canned processed meat by-products the former Emp Ave player was chewing on.
for the uninitiated, “SPAM” is a trademarked brand of canned pork product originally created to feed WWII dogfaces ..er.. soldiers in the field, and now is the official state food of Hawai`i. whereas – spam and spamming – refer to internet activities that some (ok, a lot!) of people find distasteful. this type of canned internet by-product is basically unwanted and unrequested solicitations sent by email, though in the new cyber age of social media it also means unwanted shouts, comments, replies, mentions, and direct messages sent to your social media account or tacked onto your content on sites like twitter, facebook, and myriads of other online hangouts.
to these definitions of spam some people also want to classify anything that is posted to an individual’s content stream by an automated process – ie using news feeds or some 3rd party apps that post things for you. these folks often will claim that anything automated is “spam”!
ok … let’s say we decide to agree with their definition … are the anti-automated folks willing to give up their own automation???
ah-HA! … they didn’t think we would include all the apps and bots and widgets they like to use to post and cross-post and re-post their own content to all their blogs, twitter, facebook, wordpress, slinked-in, flickr, tumblr, and where-ever-the-heck-else they post their junk on the internet!!! (and that’s assuming they are even posting “their own” junk! so many of them just steal ..er.. plagiarize ..umm.. “copy & paste” stuff created by other people!)
hey now! hands off that “share” button! that’s cheating, that is too easy! it has to go! you have to take the time to trot over to twitter or facebook or where ever the heck you are posting that stuff and manually enter the url for that thing! you know, do a little leg-work to make that tweet or post, not just click button and serve up some more spam!
see folks, this knee-jerk condemning of one Emp Ave player for spam is a butcher’s knife that cuts both ways! so be careful how you wield it!
