Overview
One of the strengths of electronic communications media is that it costs virtually nothing to send a message. These media are not free of charge: setting up a cellular telephone network or an Internet e-mail service has substantial overhead costs in equipment and connectivity. However, once these costs are paid for, the cost to transmit a message to a single recipient is minuscule when compared with older media such as postal mail. Electronic messaging is cheap and fast. It is also easy to automate: computer programs can send out millions of messages via e-mail, instant message (IM), or Usenet netnews in minutes or hours at nearly no labor cost.
From these economic realities, a sort of tragedy of the commons emerges. Any communications mechanism which is cheap and easy to automate is easy to flood with bulk messages. To send instant messages to millions of users on most IM services, all one needs is a piece of scriptable software and those users' IM usernames. The......
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Approximate Word Count: 3023
Approximate Pages: 12 (260 words per double-spaced page) |