The growing speed of channel abandonment

I've mentioned before the fact that as communication channels become infested with unsolicited commercial spam they become less and less useful and are eventually abandoned. Over at You've Been Noticed Paul Sweeney points out the abandonment of email (ArsTechnica) by teens due, at least in part, to the inundation of the channel with spam. Several consequences of this trend spring to mind.

First, switching costs into and out of channels are falling. As channels become intrusively commercialised they will simply be discarded in favour of less polluted channels because the switching costs are lower than the costs of trying to use a medium that's been compromised. (Even the switching costs for the very traditional channels are falling. I switched out of receiving postal mail years ago, as soon as the the only switching cost was directing all the mail I wanted to receive to my office and letting the unsolicited junk fall through my letterbox and straight into a recycling bin. I switched out of sales calls to my home phone a while before that by turning it off and only using my mobile.) This is really just another droplet in the deluge of bad news for interruptive commercial messages, but it makes it plainer than ever that the future for commercial messages is in relevance and opt-in.

Second, if teens are abandoning email because of the spam, and the uncertainty of even getting the messages you want to see through the spam filter, how commercialised does...oh, YouTube or MySpace have to become before they get the boot too? And is that point before or after those sites repay the acquisition costs to Google and News Corp?

Finally, a question - is there any incidental use that digital spam can be put to? I'm thinking of course of the urban legends surrounding people deliberately signing up for all the junk mail they can get their hands on and then using it to heat their houses (HalfBakery). Some of the bizarre phrases used to game Boolean spam filters have even been turned into Spam Poetry (TheRegister), which is fun for a while but perhaps not ultimately very useful unless you publish it as a book and sell a lot of copies. Digital spam has to be useful for something - tracking, data mining, sales trends, something...and someone's going to make a stack of money figuring out what it is.