When Machines Are The Audience

I recently received an email from someone at the Woodrow Wilson Center that began in the following way: “Dear Sir/Madam: I was wondering if you might share the following fellowship opportunity with the members of your list...The Africa Program is pleased to announce that it is now accepting applications...” The email was, of course, tagged as spam by my email software, since it looked suspiciously like what the U.S. Secret Service calls a 419 fraud scheme[1], or a scam where someone (generally from Africa) asks you to send them your bank account information so they can smuggle cash out of their country (the transfer then occurs in the opposite direction, in case you were wondering). Checking the email against a statistical list of high-likelihood spam triggers identified the repeated use of words such as “application,” “generous,” “Africa,” and “award,” as well as the phrases “submitted electronically” and the opening “Dear Sir/Madam.” The email piqued my curiosity because over the past year I’ve started altering some of my email writing to avoid precisely this problem of a “false positive” spam label, e.g., never sending just an attachment with no text (a class spam trigger) and avoiding the use of phrases such as “Hey, you’ve got to look at this.” In other words, I’ve semi-consciously started writing for a new audience: machines. One of the central theories of humanities disciplines such as literature and history is that our subjects write for an audience (or audiences). What happens when machines are part of this audience?