The Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman notes that a recent Symantec report estimates that less than half of email sent is now spam– hooray!– but sees a downside:

As “classic” spam has declined, it’s become clear that the internet in general – indeed, life in general – has become an awful lot spammier. Partly, this is simply because spammers have found ways to spam that don’t involve email, using texts, Twitter, Gchat and so on. But there’s a deeper point here, too….

If spamming is about abusing the resource of other people’s attention, the ethos of spam is everywhere: in clickbait headlines that promise far more than they deliver; in tweets that exploit the “curiosity gap” by tantalizingly omitting key information; in the daily email I now receive… from a clothing store where I once bought one shirt.

I still feel like I spend too much time dealing with junk mail, but maybe that’s a function of my becoming more curmudgeonly.

But I also think that Oliver is quite right that the rest of the world is becoming more spam-like, and even more worrying, that spam is getting smarter. It’s not just that sites like Unworthy do a good job of creating click headlines (why IS number 5 “the most unbelievable thing ever” on the list of “I thought Hollywood pets were all selfish, until this melted my heart”? I must know), but that the tools that content creators– and even more aggressively, gamers and casinos– have to measure our attention, and the speed with which they can offer up new things when it looks like we’re getting bored, is pretty amazing.

Distraction has always been part of human existence. But now, distraction is evolving, and turning into a predator.