There have been some interesting ideas floating around about how to deal with spam lately, and it is possibly intriguing to consider how the cultural production and perception of email has changed in light of both spam/corporate/commercial email as a standard and the shift to communications through more terse systems like Facebook and Twitter. This article from Wired online is interesting for its attempt to create a strategy for “intelligent use of email.” One might wonder about the critical judgment at play (definitions of “intelligent”), but the concept of recycling or repurposing in this context is perhaps interesting.
Then again, there is another whole area this article covers with respect to game theory and its applications for behaviour modification that may warrant some close consideration (expressed to some extent comically in the comments to the article).
Excerpt:
The Game of Life
Everyone complains about “e-mail overload” — getting so much stupid corporate e-mail that you miss out on important messages. But Byron Reeves has figured out a way to solve the problem.
How? By turning corporate e-mail into a game.
Read the artcile here.