Most people equate spam to unsolicited email, but spam on the Internet comes in all forms. Whenever you see an off-topic comment in a forum, on a blog, or just about anywhere else, it's also a form of spam.
Social networks generate another kind of spam that makes social networking undesirable for a lot of people (including me).
There's a time when I was an active member of more than half a dozen internet communities. Of the four or five years since I've had non-dial-up based internet connections (I cannot, in honesty, call it broad-band) my internet usage has sky-rocketed. There were times when I literally counted the seconds as I logged in to my e-mail account and logged out. I was so aware of my internet usage that I hardly got online for more than five or ten minutes at a stretch. That kind of thing really didn't promote what we take for granted today – blogging, social networking, file sharing (especially video sharing) and discussion groups/forums. As far as I was concerned, the internet was a medium for information exchange. If I had a particularly big document to browse online, I saved it for off-line reading and disconnected as soon as I could. Ah… the days :wink:
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