For every Apollo Night that we learned about by mass email, there s a missing scarf that we can t help find and a bass-fishing convention we have no interest in attending. It s slimy and smells bad. But SPAM is the wrong metaphor. Uninteresting mass emails should not be thought of as detestable meat products, but simply uninteresting newspaper articles. Few of us read everything in newspapers.
Newspapers contain stories, ads, opinions, announcements, and even comics.
We read the headlines and make our decision from there. Email subject lines can serve a similar function. Tiziana Dearing, a KSG student on the COOP Board of directors recently began her mass-email about the COOP s relationship with the Bow and Arrow pub with an apology about sending an email. We should be thankful. Harvard College has a daily paper, The Crimson, which gets delivered to every undergrad.