Ubiquitous and unloved, spam was one of the first surprising side effects of our improved connectedness. Finn Brunton shows us how spam has coevolved with social media, an arms race where new communal tools and behaviors designed to fight spam lead to new kinds of spam, which leads to still newer tools and behaviors. -- Clay Shirky, Associate Professor, NYU, and author of Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody Finn Brunton has done mankind a service with this coldly objective analysis of a great human evil. The ghost in the machine is ourselves. -- Bruce Sterling Spam promises to be widely read and widely taught. Finn Brunton's punchy, journalistic prose brings the topic very much to life. The material is new and important, and the writing is simply a joy to read. -- Fred Turner, Stanford University; author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture
Finn Brunton is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and the author of Spam- A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press).
Finn Brunton's excellent cultural history of spam offers a
readable, witty account of the battle between the spammers and the
spammed—a battle of often surprising complexity and astonishing
technological escalation, in an arms race that is still being
fought.—John Gilbey, Times Higher Education
Spam will fascinate readers who aren't experts in the subject
matter by shedding new light on the culture and function of their
Internet experience. But it has plenty to offer computer scientists
and online-community researchers as well… This masterful telling of
the history illustrates just how much has changed and how we fit
into the larger story.—Jennifer Golbeck, Science Magazine
This book is a gem. The goings-on of the twisted personages who
populate cyberpunk lit have nothing on the ingenious scheming of
the spammers and the scientists dedicated to shutting them down.
Read here and in days to come about this fascinatingly bizarre
subterranean cyberworld.—Scientific American
A colorful assortment of international tradespeople, drug-pushers,
swindlers, and fraudsters, spammers have become a familiar feature
of our digital landscape. Finn Brunton's investigation of the
question of spam, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet—the
problems of defining it, understanding it, and tackling it—takes us
to the front of an ongoing and highly sophisticated technological
war, a keenly contested territorial struggle for control of the
information superhighway.—Houman Barekat, The Millions
The book, a beautifully written and entertaining one, adopts an
historical approach to the discussion of spam and the
'technological drama' that it manifests...The real value of the
book however, does not lie in this historical reconstruction, but
in its ability to use spam, as a tool through to reveal by negative
reflection the positive values and beliefs that lay at the
foundation of internet communities, and the importance of attention
and trust in their working.—Information, Communication & Society
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