Stanhope Student Apartments. NC State Dining. Tapingo. Although all three are seemingly unrelated, they share, along with many other organizations here on campus, an extremely negative and annoying flaw: spam emails.
Now, I completely understand that many probably view spam email as nothing more than a very minor nuisance. Still, it’s a very widespread phenomenon amongst college students that is very prone to getting on our nerves, and thus is worth discussing.
Leslie Godoy, a first-year studying accounting, and Jordan Hahn, a first-year studying electrical engineering, stated that they did receive emails that they would classify as “spam.” Godoy stated that, on average, she receives “like five [spam emails]” daily. “Not just Tapingo,” she added, “[but also] the career emails that I don’t care for.”
Aggravating advertisements are definitely not some sort of new ordeal. From funny jingles on TV to ads on Facebook that are creepily targeted towards our specific interests, Americans are very much used to the omnipresent salesperson constantly urging us to whip out our credit cards. However, flooding inboxes with spam is where the line should be drawn.
The inbox is extremely important for the average college student. It’s where we get vital, immediate communication for school, work and extracurricular activities. I always have my notifications volume up so that I can stay up-to-date, and I’m sure plenty of other students do too. Therefore, when we’re anxiously checking our email all day for results back on an exam, it can be extremely annoying to hastily pull out our phone after we hear a “ding”, only to see a “25 percent off” here and a “buy one, get one free” there.
“Research shows that just looking through your inbox can significantly increase your stress levels,” wrote Emma M. Seppälä in an article for Psychology Today, in which she went on to list some of the specific effects of spending too much time in your inbox, such as stress, decreased productivity and lowered self-control. Following this logic, I’d argue that these effects would be intensified if that inbox was full distracting and annoying spam.
Others find that the number of ads they receive daily differs little from the number they receive in personal or work emails. “I have two personal emails, [the amount of spam] is a little less than my main email where I do most of my stuff, but it’s more than my email where I keep all of my information,” said Brenden Sledge, a first-year studying plant and soil sciences.
Of course, getting rid of the incoming stream of spam is not the most difficult thing in the world. Users can easily block and mute accounts, continuously mark all as read or make several email accounts to at least divide up the stream of spam. While many might just not be bothered by spam, there are some that are, that view spam as a constant irritant that disrupts the stream of actually important messages.
I’m definitely not suggesting some sort of legal deterrent for dealing with spam, because the very definition of “spam” is far too abstract to be put down on legislature. The boundaries of what is and isn’t would vary from person to person, and legal teams from hundreds of corporations would pop up left and right to get a bill like that shut down.
Rather, I believe that organizations should be much more conservative with how often they flood inboxes with their sales pitches. Not a new thought, for sure — I’m certain we all have wished the same thing at some point. But my argument here is similar to the argument against the constant barrage of television commercials: just like how interrupting my show makes me want to do anything but buy your product, flooding my email with ads makes me want to have nothing to do with your product. By sending advertisements in moderation, it might make someone actually stop and spend time viewing the message.
Students already have a lot of information coming at them on a daily basis. We would expect that the email, the method of communication through which most instructors and university organizations can easily communicate with students, would be free of promotions like these. The truth, though, is that they definitely are not, and it makes the common student question what right these companies have to clutter our accounts.
