I am never a fan of spam. But this is particularly true when there is an upcoming election. The level of spam I have been wading through seems to have doubled lately. We just had a provincial election here in British Columbia and all parties pulled out all stops, which included, but was not limited to; email, social media posts, robotexts and robocalls.

In Canada and the US, political campaigns are not subject to phone and text spam control laws such as our Canadian Do Not Call List legislation. There seems to be a little more restriction on email spam. A report from Nationalsecuritynews.com this past May warned that Americans would be subjected to over 16 billion political robocalls. That is a ton of spam.

During this past campaign here in B.C., I noticed that I do not respond to all spam with equal abhorrence. Ironically, the spam channels with the loosest restrictions are the ones that frustrate me the most.

There are places – like email – where I expect spam. It’s part of the rules of engagement. But there are other places where spam sneaks through and seems a greater intrusion on me. In these channels, I tend to have a more visceral reaction to spam. I get both frustrated and angry when I have to respond to an unwanted text or phone call. But with email spam, I just filter and delete without feeling like I was duped.

Why don’t we deal with all spam – no matter the channel – the same? Why do some forms of spam make us more irritated than others? It’s almost like we’ve developed a spam algorithm that dictates how irritated we get when we deal with spam.

According to an article in Scientific American, the answer might be in how the brain marshalls its own resources.

When it comes to capacity, the brain is remarkably protective. It usually defaults to the most efficient path. It likes to glide on autopilot, relying on instinct, habit and beliefs. All these things use much less cognitive energy than deliberate thinking. That’s probably why “mindfulness” is the most often quoted but least often used meme in the world today.

The resource we’re working with here is attention. Limited by the capacity of our working memory, attention is a spotlight we must use sparingly. Our working memory is only capable of handling a few discrete pieces of information at a time. Recent research suggests the limit may be around 3 to 5 “chunks” of information, and that research was done on young adults. Like most things with our brains, the capacity probably diminishes with age. Therefore, the brain is very stingy with attention. 

I think spam that somehow gets past our first line of defence – the feeling that we’re in control of filtering – makes us angry. We have been tricked into paying attention to something that was unsuspected. It becomes a control issue. In an information environment where we feel we have more control, we probably have less of a visceral response to spam. This would be true for email, where a quick scan of the items in our inbox is probably enough to filter out the spam. The amount of attention that gets hijacked by spam is minimal.

But when spam launches a sneak attack and demands a swing of attention that is beyond our control, that’s a different matter. We operate with a different mental modality when we answer a phone or respond to a text. Unlike email, we expect those channels to be relatively spam-free, or at least they are until an election campaign comes around. We go in with our spam defences down and then our brain is tricked into spending energy to focus on spurious messaging.

How does the brain conserve energy? It uses emotions. We get irritated when something commandeers our attention. The more unexpected the diversion, the greater the irritation.  Conversely, there is the equivalent of junk food for the brain – input that requires almost no thought but turns on the dopamine tap and becomes addictive. Social media is notorious for this.

This battle for our attention has been escalating for the past two decades. As we try to protect ourselves from spam with more powerful filters, those that spread spam try to find new ways to get past those filters. The reason political messaging was exempt from spam control legislation was that democracies need a well-informed electorate and during election campaigns, political parties should be able to send out accurate information about their platforms and positions.

That was the theory, anyway.