Spam: an endangered species?

Once upon a time I scoped out the available tables in my dining hall and heaved a huge, disgusted sigh.  A table with three chairs and 16 paper-tents of spam?  Where would I put my dual glasses of water and chocolate milk?

Wait a second…"once upon a time"?  More like every other night.

Spam permeates the Wellesley campus. It's on bulletin boards, brightly-colored calendars, taped to windows, scrawled across pavement, on dining hall tables—but most of all it's in thousands of messages on the campus' FirstClass e-mail and conferencing system.  It's communicated in pictures of kittens, Plato and umbrellas, and it's often written in 60-point, bold font.  Organizations send out advertisements en masse, sometimes posting the same message a dozen or more times within a brief timespan.  Spam dominates most conferences, including a significant percentage of Community, the open- discussion forum.  It even manages to worm its way into our personal inboxes.

That said, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Wellesley community is losing FirstClass in the near future.  The loss of FirstClass constitutes the loss of an online culture that Wellesley has cultivated for years.  Students and faculty alike will be forced to change their habits and find new ways to communicate their urgent messages to hundreds of individuals simultaneously.  There appears to be a general consensus that many of our most popular FirstClass "toys," including Community, should survive in some form, but there has also been concern about the continued existence of spam.  

To summarize: FirstClass is being phased out. Rather than having one system to house both e-mail and conferences for organizations and courses, we will have two separate systems. Zimbra, an e-mail, calendar and collaboration platform, will likely be our e-mail provider, while Sakai, an open-source content management system, will become home to Wellesley's scores of student organizations and courses, and thousands of meetings notifications, event reminders and assignments lists.

And so we must inquire after the fate of spam.  No longer will it be possible to create a spam message and then simultaneously e-mail it to a dozen different FirstClass conferences merely by typing a few words and clicking "send."  Switching to the strictly "opt-in" Sakai conferences may bring intercommunication between the student and dozens of groups to which she does not belong to a grinding halt.

Let's be clear: we won't miss out on notifications for the groups we actually do belong to. If you belong to the philosophy club, you're still going to hear about the upcoming lecture on epistemology. You just might have some difficulty hearing about the Green Umbrella's upcoming open meeting, the poetry reading in Tishman Commons or that really cool lecture by the professor from UCLA.  

At the same time, we are at Wellesley College, surrounded by over 2,000 tenacious young women.  If the Students for a Just and Stable Future want you to know about coal, then they'll be darned if the entire campus isn't canvassed within 48 hours.

Regardless of whether the constant inundation of spam messages continues—regardless of whether Community continues to mostly comprise obnoxious spam reposts—spam will live on.

What are other options? Will bulletin boards become a lot more crowded? Possibly. Will chalk sales skyrocket? If so, Wellesley might have to invest in some more sidewalks. Will the administration create open workspaces on Sakai titled "Lectures" or "open meetings" to enable the continuation of electronic spamming? Of course, this means that we would have to actively search for spam—something that might actually come as a welcome respite. Or will sizable portions of the student body simply end up missing out on interesting lectures, sports games and department mixers?

I can't predict the future, but I can say this: spam is about to undergo some significant renovations. It's difficult to forecast the evolutionary patterns of an online culture; for now, all anyone can do is hope that the death of FirstClass won't spawn more tabletop paper tents.