A few weeks ago I attended the Black Hat Security Conference in Las Vegas. At first glance I was one presentation on the title “Use and abuse of personal information – Politics – Edition” By Alan Michaels and Jared Byers has nothing to do with tennis. It was a breakdown of analysis carried out by a research team on how political candidates used, and in some cases abused personal information during the last national election cycle. Although much of that presentation was completely irrelevant for tennis, a detail led to me to wonder about the efficacy of E -Mail as a mass communication mechanism for tennis in this modern era.
The researchers created thousands of fake identities, each registered for campaign updates of exactly one political candidate. In this way they could keep track of whether the information they provided was shared or leaked by assessing additional messages they received. The results were striking from a privacy point of view. It appears that politicians do not care or are not adapted in protecting personal information. That is not surprising.
What stopped me cold was the researcher’s calculation that registering for communication from a candidate results in e -mail traffic that will last from 10 to 100 hours of reading time on an annual basis. Doing mathematics on the upper limit of that reach reveals that some candidates have broadcast material that the average reader would take almost two hours to fully consume every week. That is a pretty big question, the question raises whether most political e -mails are read at all.
For the most part of the population, the answer is probably no. There is no way for many people to read all the messages they receive. So although that medium is demonstrably no longer an effective communication mechanism, it is practically free to send, and in a tight breed every mood counts. That can explain the Buckshot approach that some candidates have followed. However, that part of the communication raises an uncomfortable question: how effective can messages be if no reasonable person has the ability to keep track of?
For me, the tennis relevance is that the USTA makes at every level at every level e -mail when communicating with its members. Things such as tournament schedules, memories of competition registration and marketing all arrive in our e -mailinboxes. It is not very unusual for players to miss important messages from the USTA, such as reporting suspension points or information about upcoming tournaments. I strongly suspect that most tennis players remove the most e -mails they receive from the organization without ever reading them. As an example I played for more than one captain who confessed that I did not read the letter from the captain who were sent before the play -offs and sectionals of the USTA League. (That blows me away.)
If most people don’t read e -mails from the USTA, this presents a real mystery to roll out new competitive models or perform evaluations of new delivery mechanisms. How can a new format be honestly evaluated if players don’t even know about it? If innovative new formats are tried, the amount of information must necessarily increase, which increases cognitive reading tax on potential players. The communication obstacle is important.
I have to notice that I have enough self -consciousness to realize that most people do not read my blog every day, with the exception of a handful of people who are related to me by blood or marriage. I can even place a larger number of words in the inboxes of my e -mail subscribers than the USTA in a certain week. I will evaluate that in the coming weeks.
As another interesting, apart from the presentation of the Black Hat Conference, the researchers discovered that political candidates do not think that their voters are completely concerned with cyber security. Although that is not surprising, UFOs came up more often than the subject of my life’s work. Ufos. I feel that that is a sad commentary on society.
For today, since we are confronted with the inescapable reality that some change is needed to support and retain tournament -tennis, the challenge goes beyond the design of alternative models of competition. The most discouraging problem can be to find out how you can effectively communicate new opportunities to the play community. Tournament announcements will compete with League reminders, which will compete with US Open Promotions, who will compete with everything else that already inboxes flood.
The biggest threat to evolve tennis can be the overload of the inbox.
#overload #inbox #tennis #threaten