Re: Ridvan Message of 2011 From the Universal House of Justice: A Commentary and Cont
Thanks, Simon W. Moon, for giving me the opportunity to discuss what has become a complex question on the internet: the nature of what has come to be called spam. I am a retired English teacher after 35 years in classrooms. The discussion of the term spam often reminds me of discussions of the term plagiarism. I post the following comment on the subject of spam and leave it to readers at this site for their response. Thanking you again, Simon.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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I have written the following as a form of defence against the accusation that my post is or was a form of spam. What I write on the internet and post at sites is far removed from the meaning of spam as it is used on the world-wide-web. I also try to place the term spam in a personal historical context and a context that relates to spam’s country-cousin, plagiarism.
The original term spam was coined nearly three-quarters of a century ago in 1937 by the Hormel corporation as a name for its luncheon meat: a canned, precooked, spiced meat product. The transition from meat product to internet term had a stop along the way at the comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus. In 1970 that BBC comedy show aired a sketch that featured a cafe that had a menu which featured items like: "egg, bacon, and spam; egg, bacon, sausage, and spam; spam and bacon, sausage and spam; spam and egg, spam, spam, and more spam. Finally, there was lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam." To make matters sillier in Monty Python style, the cafe was filled with Vikings who periodically broke-out into song praising spam: "spam, spam, spam, spam: lovely spam, wonderful spam."
I would like to add here, somewhat parenthetically, that while the Hormel corporation was holding a competition to find a new name for their product, the North American Bahá’í community was formulating the details of its first teaching Plan in May 1937. I have been associated with the many extensions of this Plan in one way or another for nearly 60 years. The first formulation of this Plan took place just eight weeks before the introduction of Spam onto the market. As of 2003 the Baha’i Faith had spread to over 200 countries and territories with the largest number of adherents in India, Iran and the USA; also as of 2003, Spam was sold in 41 countries worldwide. The largest consumers of Spam were in the United States, the UK and South Korea.(1)
Computer people adopted the term spam from the Python sketch to mean the endless repetition of worthless text, the commercialization of the internet, the unwanted commercial messages that come in the form of electronic junk mail or junk postings as well as posts at internet sites that: (a) nobody really wants to read/asks for and/or (b) are basically some form of plagiarism. These have become the primary meanings, among other meanings, of spam on the internet.
Spam is everywhere in e-mail inboxes, in instant messaging windows, in web site guest-books, in blogs running over internet telephony lines. As internet-based communication technology evolves so do the methods that unscrupulous individuals use to send you advertisements. Worse yet, the numbers of spam-related messages being distributed are increasing every day. When you hear the word spam, your immediate thoughts go to the more well-known and common form of spam: e-mail spam. However, other types of spam are found in a variety of internet communication mediums such as instant messaging, discussion boards, mobile phones with text messaging, newsgroups, internet telephony, blogs--basically any device or client that provides a means for communications. Some internet site administrators and moderators take a very wide-ranging interpretation of the meaning of the term spam and include just about anything they they feel inappropriate and, especially material found at more than one website, as spam. It is here that my posts are deleted or I am banned from a site with or without warning.
According to the famous poet T.S. Eliot, “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”(2) As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and weft of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.”(3) -Ron Price with thanks to (1)“A History of the Term Spam,” internet.com, 24 July 2008; (2) T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1999; and (3) Emerson, Letters, p. 178.
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