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

by Jussi Parikka, Tony D. Sampson

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 overlaod. 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.

330 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2009

About the author

Jussi Parikka is a Finnish new media theorist and Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is also Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art as well as Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of individually interesting essays but when taken as a whole, the book was a bit repetitive. The central conceit, that the anomalous is in fact more mundane than we realize and works to construct the "normal," is an idea worthy of extended consideration. I think, however, you could read selected essays according to your interests and come away with the main argument, without having to read the whole. Which is, I guess, the beauty of an edited collection.

My grad students found it a bit tedious. We used the book as the "inspiration" reading for a portfolio project and on that front, it was a complete failure. Part of the problem was related to them struggling with some of the material. The other, much larger factor, is that they did not relate to it in any personal way. The resulting projects stuck very closely to the topics of spam and viruses and lacked the interest of the projects produced when I used a different book. I expected that they would play with the ideas of noise, anomaly, etc. but it just wasn't so.