Is the Internet becoming Citizen's Band-ized?

In 1961 when I got my first CB radio there were only eight people on the air in my county. We all signed on carefully using our call signs, limited our conversation to important things, and on channel 9 (the public channel then) we could talk 30 miles. You know the end of this story. Citizen's band was democratized -- everybody got one, licenses were not required, and the airwaves got so jammed that a CBer is happy to 'get out' 10 miles. And the bottom-feeding level of CB conversation makes Oprah look high class. Is this the ghost of Christmas future for the Internet? Is the Internet becoming Citizen Band-ized?

Not many years ago most of us greeted our dozen or so e-mail messages with delight -- Gee! somebody likes me! There was an electronic intimacy we appreciated, and still do. But as the Internet has grown in stupendous proportions, (and there is no end in sight), the resulting E-mail blizzard is causing an increasing number of on-line folk to get snowed in. Some are even unplugging altogether, a sad choice.

And that is just the regular mail... what about the junk-Email? With a simple click of the mouse any individual can send the latest clever version of "the Night before Christmas" to all hundred people on their list. They seldom realize that most of those recipients will think it clever to also click it on to a couple hundred themselves. The result is a blizzard of Spam E-mail. It is getting harder to sort the important from the chaff. And the commercial Junk E-mail is now reaching massive proportions. (And they're just getting started.) So far, the courts have sided with the junk E-Mailers, even if you have to pay to download their advertisements.

Of course there's the new e-mail filter software (like Eudora-Pro) which enables the recipient to automatically forward, file, respond -- even delete -- messages based on the sender's name or any word in the content. (Don't send me a message with the word "Sale" or "Price" in it. -- the trouble here is that, perhaps you want to talk about the 'high price' of our calling, and you get deleted as a SalesSpam!) Then, of course, there are