Have People Lost A Fighting Spirit Against Spam Or Is Pew Faking The Data Again?

from the just-a-part-of-online-life dept

According to the folks at Pew (who are suffering from a credibility hit these days), people are growing accustomed to spam. It still annoys people to no end, but it's just become so common that people have given up thinking about it or fighting against it, and just think of it as an annoying fact of life, like traffic. Of course, it's not really clear that the data actually says this. Basically, this conclusion appears to be driven by two stats: (1) people trust email less but (2) they're not reading less email -- sort of. The study actually says 22% of people say they are spending less time on email because of spam, which is down from 29% the year before. However, it's a bit of a stretch to conclude from this one data point that people are resigned to spam. It could mean that email simply has become more important in other aspects. Or, it could mean that most of the people who were really annoyed by spam decreased their email usage last year instead of this year. The problem with the data is that you can't really compare the rate of change this year to last year, because (obviously) they're starting from a different position. Most importantly, this could just be an indication that spam filters have become more effective. It wouldn't be surprising to find out that many people have become resigned to spam -- but the data shown here doesn't actually seem to prove that at all.