A tangent: how is the tenor of the discourse on spamming unlike/like that surrounding advertising on WWW pages?

Browsers do permit surfing without downloading/displaying images and therefore avoid much banner-based advertisements. [remarkable to note very little use of markup to provide content for alt attributes on img elements]

It seems that there is also an act of will in reading/deleting spam or even advertisments. And the exercise of that will seems to be dependent upon identifing provenance (from field), subject matter (subject field) and how these match content (message). There is a sociolgoical dimension here that may suggest that text-analysis intersects at some point with the pragmatics of discourse analysis.

Willard's little missive suggests to me that one also uses proto-text analysis to judge tone of postings. Readers familiar with Willard's style will note the copia of question marks in this particular example and may conclude something about his tone if they recall that most of his postings involve no more than a single question. N'est-ce pas?