An affront to the good name of ‘bacon’
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Bacon cannot speak for itself. So I will speak on its behalf. Who’s with me? It has come to my attention that the term ‘bacon’ is being sullied. It’s now being used as a shorthand label for all the nonsense cluttering your email in-box, the stuff that falls somewhere between email from a Nigerian businessman and urgent notification that your credit limit has been ... exceeded. You know, all the coupons, recipes, newsletters, updates, tips, sales, tricks and alerts that you willingly signed up for at one point and now just delete, delete, delete when you see them stacking up:
‘Bacon is all of your Facebook notifications or bank e-mails saying that a bill is due,’ says Tommy Vallier, a social media consultant and one of the people that coined the term at a Pittsburgh technology conference in 2007. ‘We came up with the word just as bacon really started to become a problem.’
It’s such a problem that now we have ‘How to manage e-mail in-box bacon’ suggestions, and there’s even a service ($20 a year) to help you unsubscribe to it all.
Don’t get me wrong, such tips and services all sound swell. But do we have to sully the good name of bacon? Can’t we come up with another name? Like, e-clutter? Or, I don’t know, how about ‘unwanted e-mails?’ Why call it bacon? Do you join me in my outrage?
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--Rene Lynch
Twitter / renelynch
Photo: Bacon Love. Credit: Not On Display via Flickr
