In McLuhan-esque terms, new media are always perceived as threatening and alienating , because they are disorienting and force us to turn our assumptions upside down and inside out, to perceive differently. We are only just discovering how these new media will transform the human experience. Some antispammers operate under the fallacious assumption that the Internet is a noise-free communications medium. But this scenario can easily be compared to the telephone and the busy executive. While long distance charges and outbound calls are costly, local calls do not present a cost barrier.
Many companies already employ a vast army of telemarketers.
There was a time when secretaries did not take telephone calls. Of course, that was before the telephone had been invented. There is absolutely no reason why the same gatekeeper for other communications will not handle email correspondence as well. Multiple email addresses will be as common as rotary lines. Today, much of this has already come to pass with the proliferation of free email accounts available from Yahoo, Hotmail, and many others, which can be accessed via a web page from any computer connected to the Internet from anywhere, including points of free access such as universities and public libraries.