[NetBehaviour] The Spam Book: On Porn, Viruses and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture

[marc garrett]

The Spam Book: On Porn, Viruses and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side 
of Digital Culture

By Jussi Parikka

https://www.academia.edu/208154/The_Spam_Book_On_Porn_Viruses_and_Other_Anomalies_from_the_Dark_Side_of_Digital_Culture

"For those of us increasingly reliant on email networks in our everyday 
social interactions, spam can be a pain; it can annoy; it can deceive; 
it can overload. Yet spam can also entertain and perplex us. This book 
is an aberration into the dark side of network culture. Instead of 
regurgitating stories of technological progress or over celebrating 
creative social media on the Internet, it filters contemporary culture 
through its anomalies. The book features theorists writing on spam, 
porn, censorship, and viruses. The evil side of media theory is exposed 
to theoretical interventions and innovative case studies that touch base 
with new media and Internet studies and the sociology of new network 
culture, as well as post-representational cultural analysis.”

“Parikka and Sampson present the latest insights from the humanities 
into software studies. This compendium is for all you digital Freudians. 
Electronic deviances no longer originate in Californian cyber fringes 
but are hardwired into planetary normalcy. Bugs breed inside our mobile 
devices. The virtual mainstream turns out to
be rotten. The Spam book is for anyone interested in new media theory.”

—Geert Lovink, Dutch/Australian media theorist

“What if all those things we most hate about the Internet—the spam, the 
viruses, the phishing sites, the flame wars, the latency and lag and 
interruptions of service, and the glitches that crash our computers—what 
if all these are not bugs, but features?
What if they constitute, in fact, the way the system functions? The Spam 
Book explores this disquieting possibility.”

—Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University