I have to page down three or four screens just to get to the beginning of the joke or story.

Yesterday I paged down four screens of junk information in one of her e-mails, only to see this message at the end:

"I Enjoy Hearing From You And All Your News .. Keep In Touch :>)"

Yes, that was the entire message. That message, of course, had been forwarded multiple times to multiple people each time. Apparently no one thought it detracted from the sincerity of the message to have it forwarded over and over, without any personalization at all. As you can imagine, I was enormously touched by such a heartfelt thought.

Another friend sends me joke after joke, links to Web pages, and endless photos that ridicule Osama bin Laden or extol the virtues of patriotism. Periodically he slips in a message that talks about how great friends are. Of course, those encourage me to forward the message to every friend I have.

Some of his messages come with an attachment with an .eml extension. This is Outlook Express, which I refuse to use out of principle, so anything with that extension gets deleted without a look.

I got a message from him once (forwarded, of course) explaining that he sent jokes because he wanted to maintain contact but couldn't think of anything to say.

Would you guess that I talk to this friend, in person or on the phone, almost every day?

The E-Mail Flood
As computers have moved into everybody's office and everybody's home (well, at least as regards those reading this), the volume of e-mail messages some of us have to deal with has grown to mammoth proportions. I know people who get, literally, hundreds of e-mails every day from co-workers seeking their help. They are not helped, and usually don't appreciate, wading through jokes they've probably seen several times already.

(Some of them still find the time to forward me jokes they don't read themselves.)

I myself get quite a bit of mail, because I have a habit of signing up for lists that send me, sometimes, 30 or 40 messages a day.

Being a Good Friend
If you really value your friends and want to do them a favor, you can do it best by saving them some time. If you feel compelled to forward a joke, is it really that difficult to go through and clean it up so your friend(s) can read it more easily?

It might take a few seconds to do it, but you'll be saving that few seconds for everyone on your distribution list.

Another factor to consider is this: We all complain constantly about how slow the Web has become—www means World Wide Wait, right?

I can't honestly say it makes any difference, but I have to think when a person sends 30 or 40 messages out to a distribution list, each of them with a one- or two-megabyte picture attached, it creates a temporary load on the servers they're going through.

We Have Met the Enemy…
Multiply that by the millions of people who do it all day long, and you have, I am convinced, one of the causes for the slowness of the Internet. Pogo was right: "We have met the enemy, and it is us."

If you've subscribed to a list server, this becomes even more important. Some lists can have many thousands of subscribers. If a thread (a continuing discussion) goes on for a while, with each participant just adding a comment and forwarding everything else in the messages back to the list, it doesn't take long to build up a pretty substantial amount of traffic.

American Consequences
I suppose this is one of those American things. We've never really had to conserve, so we don't bother.

The Internet is slow? Get a broadband connection. No trees left for houses? Move to another area where there are still trees. No more room in the landfill? Dig another hole in the ground. Can't produce enough food to make a profit? Tinker with the DNA to get more from the plants and animals.

And can anyone tell me why Windows 2000 is slower on a 1.5GHz chip with 1GB of memory than DOS.3 was on an 8MHz chip with 640k?

There comes a time, I think, when progress is no longer synonymous with bigger and faster.

Yes, there are people working on a much faster Internet. And no doubt, once it is implemented, we will see faster downloads and quicker Web sites — for a while.

But unless we learn to conserve the resources of the Internet, they will be filled with junk noise, instead of meaningful conversations.

We all talk about people taking responsibility for their actions—let's make sure we do what we preach.

Tom Anderson gets more e-mail than he can handle. Please don't send him your jokes.