I’ve long been intrigued by the amount of effort, decision making and waste involved in producing the product we universally know as “junk mail”. I’m sure you know the stuff I mean. Those ubiquitous, urging and unsolicited pamphlets that gets crammed into our letter boxes with monotonous regularity. In my case the shining new offerings are almost invariably thrown straight into the rubbish bin with only the briefest of glances. That often leads me to think junk mail might possibly be one of the most redundant products of our time.
Another way of describing junk mail might be as the analogue equivalent of the digital advertising dumps we also receive on a regular basis from the likes of Facebook, Amazon and Google (FAG!!). Apart from the big three, many of us are also targeted by swathes of other spam which somehow manages to sleaze its way into our email inboxes.
In considering all the complex and elaborate processes that clearly go into creating our largely unwanted hard copy and electronic junk mail, I’m led to wonder what motivations lay behind their production. I’m curious too about where all the unwanted paper eventually ends up? To that end, I will be examining a couple of possible answers to these questions in the story of Gillian Junkmail.
As for the fate of all the digital stuff we receive, I’d be willing to bet most of it is turned pretty promptly into digital dust. Not before it leaves long trails of tell-tale data about us in its wake though. This data will eventually be trawled over by algorithm writers in their never ceasing quest to find ever more suckers, I mean buyers. It’s a dog eat dog world out there in the land of Capitalism, but hey ya gotta be in it to win it!!
Despite the apparent lack of interest in a product which is largely given away free to consumers, the ever expanding and ongoing production of junk mail tends to indicate it must remain a valid and worthy enterprise to pursue. If it weren’t companies, both large and small, would long ago have abandoned the idea of devoting so much of their energy and money towards churning it out. I guess we have to look beyond the actual product and consider it more as one of many tools modern PR, advertising, sales and marketing people have at their disposal to rouse our consumer interests. Junk mail drops are likely a much cheaper promotional alternative than expensive newspaper, magazine or television campaigns. At their heart though, every advertising technique has the aim of driving sales and profits ever upwards. While they continue to be successful in doing that job, it’s reasonable to assume they will be persisted with, even though it is must be quite a difficult task to gauge just how successful or effective any junk mail campaign might be in getting bang for the buck.
Despite a lot of junk mail being promptly disposed of, I don’t wish to suggest it is universally despised. I personally know a number of people who read every single offering they receive, sometimes in minute detail. I can only assume this is done in an attempt to assuage misplaced shopping therapy requirements or some other forms of human aspirational and social need. For some, junk mail is often one of the few interfaces they have with the outside world.
Anyway, that’s enough idle speculation about junk mail’s various social impacts for the moment. It’s time to take a quick look at some of the physical and creative requirements that go into producing the stuff.
Apart from ensuring sufficient stock is on hand and that all relevant legal processes have been duly observed before a campaign begins, most junk mail creation is likely to be kicked off with a bit of strategic thinking and possibly some market analysis. The results would then be used to determine which demographics and locations are to be targeted. The ideas and results from that exercise would then be further developed through a range of creative thinking processes, all with a view of trying to best capture consumer attention. After some healthy debate about style and content, decision makers would usually reach a position where it was possible to make the call on things like which photos or graphics to be used, what writing style should be employed, which fonts to use and what kind of formatting might best capture the consumer’s imagination. Finally a choice would need to be made about what type of paper should be used. Only when this entire complex set of detail had been tinkered and tailored to finality, usually with the aid of computer design programs, would the final draft be settled on. Then it’s time for printing.
Printing the finished junk mail design could be done either in-house or contracted out to a specialist printer, depending on the desired quality and size of the print run. Both options, however, require the combined use of computer power, high tech printers and exotic inks garnered together from all over the planet to complete the task. The paper too, which is probably the chief and most important ingredient of junk mail, is also likely to have travelled many thousands of kilometres from its source before it reaches the printer.
Paper use in the Western World only came to prominence after the Guttenburg printing press promoted a wider embracing of literacy during the early 1400’s. It had long before been known in the Chinese and Arabic worlds, but was mainly used for wrapping things. Prior to the paper’s introduction to Europe, it required the killing of 250 sheep to make sufficient vellum parchment to produce just one hand written copy of the bible.
By the time the Renaissance period got into full swing, mass literacy and a need to better record business contracts and sales records had prompted an ever increasing demand for paper. Paper quickly became so cheap and plentiful that by the 18th century companies had even began printing single use newspapers. A short while later, with the invention of perforated paper, came our much loved product, toilet tissue, and that is a demand that’s not going to go away any time soon. Demand for paper has continued to grow right up until this day, though 2013 was the first year in which the global manufacture of paper finally declined. There are many possible reasons for that, but mostly it’s because digital alternatives are finally catching on.
Paper itself is usually made from the cellulose collected from breaking down organic material These days we get our cellulose mainly from paper pulp and modern chemicals, as well as a lot of recycling (cardboard boxes made in China for computer products can be recycled 6 times before they finally wear out!). In the early days of printing, paper was actually made by soaking cloth in urine. So great did the early demand become that people were known to go out and collect clothing from the corpses of those who’d died on battlefields. Just as well we have so many fast growing softwood trees in the perfect environment of our planet’s temperate zones to meet the hungry demands of today.
Before moving on to the story, I’d like to leave you with a few interesting facts about the folding of paper. The process of doing that is one of exponential growth. That is, with the average paper having thickness of 1/10th of a millimetre, if you fold the paper perfectly in half, it doubles its thickness with each fold. Things get interesting very quickly as the number of folds increases. Folding some paper in half three time will get you to about the thickness of a nail.
Seven folds (the generally accepted maximum that can be done manually) will be about the thickness of a notebook of 128 pages.
If you had a sufficiently large piece of paper and enough energy, 10 folds and the paper will be about the width of a hand.
23 folds will get you to one kilometre.
30 folds will get you to space. Your paper will be now 100km high.
Keep folding it. 42 folds will get you to the Moon, and by the time you got to 51, you would burn in the Sun.
Fast forwarding to 81 folds and your paper will be 127,786 light-years wide, almost as thick as the Andromeda Galaxy!!
The Story of Gillian Junkmail
Tariq was born in the north east Syrian town of Ar-Raqqa back in 1958. At the time of his birth, the ancient and ethnically diverse town, which is now more commonly known as Raqqa, was the sixth largest city in Syria. Back then it was a quiet and comfortable place to live a happy and reasonable life. Tariq certainly enjoyed a carefree and simple childhood there. Gaining an education from a good school. Swimming in dams and rivers during the heat of summer; followed by lazy days spent in his family compound over the cooler months of winter.
When he grew to be a man, Tariq was lured to his country’s capital, Damascus, in search of better work opportunities. He spent a couple of years as a soldier in the army, before taking the plunge and starting up a business of his own - a cloth business in the labyrinthine depths of Al-Hamidiyah Souq, the marvellous market located inside the ancient Damascus city walls.
In time Tariq met and married his wife, Fatima, and fathered four healthy children. Everything was going as well as can be expected through the usual ups and downs of life in a society that didn’t always enjoy the freest of democracies or the most open human rights record. Things, however, changed for the worst in the year 2011. That was when the Syrian Civil War began. Inspired by the Arab Spring that had already swept around the African edge of the Mediterranean Sea, there came loud calls for regime change in Syria. The army’s brutal crackdown in response to the major uprising against the ruling elite was swift, destructive and uncompromising. Brutal violence continued to escalate rapidly and soon exposed cracks and divisions amongst fragile tribal, political and religious divisions. It all unhinged what had up to that point been a reasonably cohesive community.
Two of Tariq’s sons were badly beaten for their early involvement in the call for change. They fled in fear for their lives to neighbouring Jordan. As the brutality continued to widen, Tariq’s other two children also fled to the north. Caught in the dilemma of what he and his wife should do, Tariq was mysteriously contacted by an old army buddy who made him what was a reasonable offer to sell his business. Tariq, who was scared and confused by all that was happening around him, reluctantly took the offer. He and Fatima decided to also pack up their lives and leave Damascus. They left their rented apartment and headed back to live in Raqaa, to live at his childhood home with his aged parents.
Although there were already signs of emerging unrest back in Raqaa, Tariq decided he needed to start a new business to ensure he and Fatima still had at least an income on which to survive. When they put their heads together about what they might be able to do, the couple decided to go into the food business, producing healthy and tasty take away Arabic food, of the kind that was commonly available in Damascus, but not so much in Raqaa. Using a street level space at the front of his parent’s home, the room was soon converted into a clean glass fronted shop with a good sized kitchen in the rear. Most of the ingredients they needed for their fresh cooked menu could still be easily acquired at the local market and the couple had already worked out what tasty offering they could easily produce, and which they anticipated might be desired by the good people of their neighbourhood. The next step in their planning was to produce a pamphlet announcing their products and advising of the grand opening day.
Tariq had an old school chum who owned a small but still operating print shop. They contacted him and decided to produce 10.000 pamphlets, hoping they would spread the good word about their new enterprise as widely as possible. The pamphlets were duly printed on a range of vivid coloured paper which had made its way to Raqaa from China, via Beirut many years before. Gillian Junkmail, who was printed 8,566th in the print run, was turned out in bright technicolour onto a bright blue piece of A5 paper.
Sadly, the peace in Raqaa took a severe turn for the worse, right at the time Tariq and Fatima were about to embark on their new venture in March 2013. Jihadist militants from a number of splinter fronts, as well as a mixed bag of other assorted groups overran government loyalists in what has since become known as the Battle of Raqqa. The rebels declared the city under their control after seizing the central square and pulling down the statue of the former president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.
By June 2013, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ,or ISIL as it is now more widely known, had established and iron fisted and disruptive rule over the city in their grand plan of converting the city into a renewed Caliphate, similar to the one which had been created by Abbasids in Raqqa during the 9th century. The city quickly became known as the “hotel of the revolution” as many supporters of from other places in Syria and Iraq made their way there.
In taking control of the city, ISIL embarked on more widespread killing of religious minorities as well as the destruction of a range of historical monuments. The ensuing mayhem prevented Tariq’s shop from ever getting off the ground, and he and his family were left to simply try and survive in the city as best they could. We leave Tariq here, along with the hope that he and his family eventually survive the modern day catastrophe.
We turn our attention instead to Gillian Junkmail. After the print run had been completed, she was taken, along with 500 other pamphlets, to the eastern outskirts of Raqaa. Many of her companions were distributed by hand to citizens in the street. Others were placed in the letter boxes of those homes which had one. The remainder, including Gillian, were left in a small pile on a table in a local tea house.
A young man who worked cleaning dishes in the tea house ended up taking Gillian home to show his mother at the end of one of his shifts. After a quick scan by the mother, Gillian was left on the dining room table in a small room which served as both dining and bedroom for the boy’s family. Gillian remained on the corner of that table for several months, until one day a mortar shell blew up just outside the second story apartment. The shell, and the several others which followed, totally destroyed both levels of the building, in the process knocking the table over and causing Gillian to fall onto the floor.
Fortunately nobody was at home at the time of the shelling, but the young man from the tea shop and his family were forced to abandon the house and seek whatever shelter they could find elesewhere.
As the fighting and killing in Raqqa continued to intensify, Gillian was left abandoned on the floor, blown here and there by whatever eddies of breeze ha made their way in through the broken walls. She remained there until one day a young woman dressed in combat fatigues and carrying an expensive and high powered rifle over her shoulder entered the room. The woman, who had been a crack rabbit hunter during her childhood, had been sent out by one of the warring factions to set up a sniper position overlooking the street below where a dusty Gillian had been laying for the last several months.
The street was by then well known in the Raqqa community as sniper alley. Several other snipers had also set up in other building along the street. Because the street was a known no-go area, very few people ever ventured out onto it, neither during the day or the night. The lady sniper, however, remained diligent in fulfilling the task she’d been allocated. She lifted the upturned table and dragged it over to the window as a support for steadying her aim. When she got the table over to the window, she noticed it was uneven and lopsided. In order to make it more stable, the woman looked around to see if there was anything that she might put under the offending table leg to lift it back up to an even keel. That was then she spotted Gillian. Moving swiftly she picked Gillian Junkmail from the floor and folded her several times, until she was about the same size as the gap between the floor and the table leg. Gillian did her job well, and the table was soon stable. The woman set up her stand and rifle on the table and then waited.
Nothing happened for weeks. There was little or no movement at all on the street below. After several days, and when some of the other snipers out of boredom had started taking pot shots at buildings, she decided to join in the distraction. At the end of the street, opposite to where our female sniper lay in wait, somebody had drawn the outline of a human body on a wall. The head had what appeared to be an apple drawn on top of it. This apple became her target over the next few days. Shooting off regular shots whenever she became frustrated or bored, our female shooter was a dead eye when it came to hitting the apple. Her bullets, aided by Gillian’s stabilizing influence, hit the apple so many times that a hole was eventually blown right through the cement breeze block.
The sniper post was eventually abandoned after the Syrian Airforce began regular bombing raids over the town. Gillian was left abandoned and contorted under the leg of the family dining table.
It was only when some soldiers from other warring factions were conducting house to house searches, looking for what they considered sinners, that Gillian was once again discovered.
A young man who spoke with a European accent lifted Gillian out from under the table leg, curious to see what the suspicious looking piece of paper might have been. He glanced quickly at the front of the pamphlet, feeling immediately hungry when he spotted the sumptuous array of foods shown in the graphics.
When he turned Gillian over, the man found and read the weekly shopping list that the tea house boy’s mother had prepared for herself and her five children.
• Flat Bread
• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Parsley
That was it. The young man then screwed Gillian up into a ball and threw it out the window. The breeze was strong that afternoon. It soon picked Gillian up and caused her to roll right out of the city and into the surrounding desert. Gillian was eventually pinned to the spikes of a plant which tended to thrive in the arid conditions. As time progressed and the elements continued to erode her organic cells, Gillian was eventually turned back into the dust from whence she had come. In the process she at least provided a modicum of chemicals and other organic residue to help sustain the plant with which she had spent her last days.