For those of you expecting a long rant about the negative aspects of technological spam – about the annoyance of it, the wasted time spent on it, its contribution to the evils of the world, and its negative impact on the environment (yes, spam is not green – see an article about it here and another here) – I am sorry to disappoint. This post is about trying to make the best of spam, since it doesn’t appear that it is going anywhere.

I personally believe in optimistic pragmatism, a way of making decisions and seeing the world not only in a practical and realistic way, but also through the optimism  that I get from my hope and trust in God.  In doing so, I try to look for the good, the true, and the beautiful in everything, even though I realize that on a practical level, this may be difficult to do.

Take spam, for example.  This morning, I received 325 pieces of spam on this blog in the form of post spam – spam messages that are posted to the blog.  So far, I’ve received over 1500 spam messages on this blog. Rather than seeing this only an annoyance, I take this as a sign that our blog now has been around long enough and is just popular enough to warrant the negative attention.

Also, as bad as it may seem in a practical real world that would call them “suckers,” maybe, just maybe, the proliferation of spam shows us that there are still innocent and trusting people in the world that want to believe what others tell them, even if it is in the form of spam.

In addition, spam may, as my coworker, Alyssa, notes, “toughen our resolve to things that really aren’t very beautiful at all.” Think about it – if you can deal with the minor annoyance of spam, a very impersonal part of the relationship between you and technology, it just might help you train yourself to deal with minor annoyances in your relationships with real people. And maybe you will be at least ever so slightly better able to deal with even more troublesome issues.

Even so, I’m very grateful at this point for the creators of Akismet, the software that blocks the vast majority of the spam on this blog.

Steve Elmore
Director of Communications
C.S. Lewis Foundation