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Here’s a few examples of how Gmail has fared at matching the content of email messages to my Gmail address with advertising content.
A forwarded review of King Arthur gives me “King Arthur Competition” and “King Arthur – Was He Real?” For something this easy and contemporary, I would have expected to see suggestions about movie times and locations, offers to publish my screenplay, and collections of King Arthur collectibles.
An anecdote about Eamon de Valera delivers Shillelagh (sic.), “Irish Clan Aran Sweaters”, and “Classic Irish Imports”. This truly an easy one, since it’s a small pool of similar source terms to sort through. “No, I meant Eamon de Valera, the famous Irish ballet dancer…” Will Gmail suggest links with correct spellings at some future date, or offer correct links to things that you’ve mis-spelled?
A message about another forwarded email sent a few moments before brings “Groupwise email”, “Ecarboncopy.com”, and “Track Email Reading Time”. These are accurate by topic, but not interesting.
A recent email exchange on how to use an excel spreadsheet template card sorting analysis offers four links. Three are sponsored, the other is ‘related’. The sponsored links include “OLAP Excel Browser”, “Microsoft Excel Templates”, and “Analysis Services Guide”. A related link is, “Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR”. These are simple word matches – none of them really approached the central issue of the conversation, which concerned how to best use automated tools for card sorting.
Last month, in the midst of an exchange about making vacation plans for the 4th of July with family, Gmail offered “Free 4th of July Clip Art”, “Fireworks Weather Forecasts”, and “U.S. Flags and patriotic items for sale”. Given the obvious 4th of July theme, this performance is less impressive, but still solid, offering me a convenience-based service in a timely and topical fashion.
Most interesting of all, a message mentioning a relative of mine named Arena yields links for “Organic Pastas” and “Fine Italian Pasta Makers”. Someone’s doing something right with controlled vocabularies and synonym rings, since it’s clear that Google knows Arena is an Italian surname in this instance and not a large structure for performances: even though it only appeared in the text of the email once, and there was no context to indicate which meaning it carried.
Beyond the obvious – you send me a message, Gmail parses it for terms and phrases that match a list of sponsored links, and I see the message and the links side-by-side – what’s happening here?
Three things:
1. Gmail is product placement for your email. In the same way that the Coke can visible on the kitchen table during a passing shot in the latest romantic comedy from Touchstone pictures is more an advertising message than part of the overall mise en scene, those sponsored links are a commercially driven element of the experience of Gmail that serves a specific agenda exterior to your own.
2. Gmail converts advertisements (sponsored links) into a form of hypertext that should be called advertext. Gmail is creating a new advertext network composed of Google’s sponsored links in companion to your correspondence. Before Gmail, the sponsored links that Google returned in accompaniment to search queries were part of an information space outside your immediate personal universe,
3. Gmail connects vastly different information spaces and realms of thinking. Google’s sponsored links bridge any remaining gap between personal, private, individual conversations, and the commercialized subset of cyberspace that is Google’s ad-verse. You will inevitably come to understand the meaning and content of your messages differently as a result of seeing them presented in a context informed by and composed of advertising.
The implications of the third point are the most dramatic. When all of our personal spaces are fully subject to colonization by the ad-verse, what communication is left that isn’t an act of marketing or advertisement?

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Five minutes after logging into my shiny new gmail account today and sending out a hello message toa few friends, I got a taste of new technology pranksterism: an old friend sent a reply to my hello loaded with keywords for everyone’s favorite flavors of spam. Naturally, my friend had read the Gmail intro that outlines their keyword targeted ad policy, stating that one of the conditions of participating in the beta was that Google would serve up ads related to the content of my messages within the new UI.
I don’t know how aggressively Google will match ads to content, but I haven’t seen anything tied to Scranton, PA on my screen yet. As a riposte, my friend should soon see plenty of discount remedies for embarrassing medical conditions, debilitating psychological illnesses, and other matters of questionable taste.
Funny or not, I find it a bit spooky that my mail is being parsed in order to drive advertising. Yes, un-encrypted email is basically as private as a post-card – but it’s highly unlikely that the local post office is going to slip a brochure for travel agencies and package vacations into friends’ mailboxes to accompany the post-cards I send them while I’m visiting Barcelona or Tenerife.
And then there are the inevitable followup questions: what kinds of patterns is Google building on top of this? Are they using geomatching to ID clusters of themes within zip codes? Maybe creating a history of my searching behavior and the number of times I follow the links placed by the engine, to establish a baseline for how susceptible I am to advertising? Or how often people in certain networks read and reply to messages with certain kinds of content?
I don’t think paranoia is appropriate, but there is a double-edged sword in every technology – especially one like this that combines accumulating personal data with tremendous interpretive power.
And even if I did sign up for the free account knowing that Gmail use implied acceptance of this practice, privacy remains a fundamental right. You can’t create valid and binding contracts that require or permit illegal activity.
Look out for travel guides to Scranton…

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It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to read the Word of the Day emails that I get from the good people at Merriam Webster and Yourdictionary.com: long enough that I’ve set up a filter directing their daily contributions to the betterment of my vocabulary into a one of those dead-end Outlook folders that you see highlighted in bold, but never manage to do anything other than bulk delete every few months when you recognize the number of unread messages has crossed from two to three digits. (The count of unread words of the day in my folder is now 91 – just about time to purge again.)
But now, thanks to the atrocious epidemic of spam that’s raging without surcease, I don’t need to feel bad about ignoring the latest juicy word to drop into my Inbox.
Now instead of knowing that it will only be shunted aside and ignored for months before its’ summary termination, I can calmly watch as it’s disposed of without ado.
Now all I need to do for a rich and unusual lexical lesson is peruse the subject lines of the dozens of spam messages that the layers of filters deployed by my ISP haven’t corralled as parasitic trash.
Thanks to the pertinacious conclave of spammers who’ve found the means to pollute the Internet with offers of discount medicines and penile enlargement disguised behind word combinations generated by dictionaries and scripts, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of uncanny solecisms gracing my inbox every day.
Things like, “libidinous plutarchy”, “inconspicuous megohm”, “charcoal expectorant”, and others not even worth mentiong despite their remarkable incongruity bring me unforeseen verbal richness.
Aside from the surrealists and their experiments with automatic writing during the 30’s, who but a spammer would ever think to send out a message about “albania seethe pfennig columbia” – which by the way would make a great name for comic book villainness “You haven’t won yet, Albania Seethe! Justice will be done!”
My day is already good when I can look forward to reading about “erosible integument”, which I seem to remember overhearing the last time I was within fifty yards of a geochemistry lab.
“Systemic cohomolgy” sounds like a pretty cool degenerative disease, or maybe a death metal band.
“Afghanistan surname baboon” is the sort of thing I’d expect to hear coming from one of those early artificial intelligence programs trying to recreate human speech: the sort that you used to see on Nova in the early 80’s; you know the scene – lots of twenty-something guys who haven’t been out in the sunlight enough even though they’re at UC San Jose are all standing around a radio-shacked amateur version of a speaker cabinet looking intently at an amber monitor, while one of them types “Hello. How are you today?” on a keyboard without a cover, only to end up visibly crestfallen when a tinny synthesized voice spits out something akin to gibberish above, and in the end they utter the inevitable combination of exuberant pronouncements regarding natural language processing, and conditioned realism about the fallacies of science fiction expectations.
Some of the spammers no doubt prefer to take a more Zen minimalist approach to fomenting palaver, using single words that bespeak a substantial degree of amphiboly; “gasify”, “archfool”, “deciduous”, “involute” and “burg” are examples of this tradition.
Then there are the imperatives, not to be casually ignored without some measure of trepidation: “deconvolve”, “rebut”, “throb”, and “migrate” for example.
With all these SAT words flowing uninterruptedly into my mailbox, there’s practically no excuse for not doing the Times crossword in pen.
So I say “Thank You Spammers!” Spam On! Whenever I want a tasty linguistic morsel, I’ll just shut off my spam filters…

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