<nettime-ann> The Spam Book - On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies From

Announcing a new book on the dark side of network culture:

THE SPAM BOOK

On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies From the Dark Side of Digital Culture

edited by Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson

With Foreword by Sadie Plant

Hampton Press, 2009

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

Contents:
Foreword, Sadie Plant.
On Anomalous Objects of Digital Culture: An Introduction, Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson.
CONTAGIONS
Mutant and Viral: Artificial Evolution and Software Ecology, John Johnston.
How Networks Become Viral: Three
Questions Concerning Universal Contagion, Tony D. Sampson.
Extensive Abstraction in Digital Architecture, Luciana Parisi.
Unpredictable Legacies: Viral Games in the Networked World, Roberta Buiani.
BAD OBJECTS.
Archives of Software—Malicious Codes and the Aesthesis of Media Accidents, Jussi Parikka.
Contagious Noise: From Digital Glitches to Audio Viruses, Steve Goodman.
Toward an Evil Media Studies, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey.
PORNOGRAPHY.
Irregular Fantasies, Anomalous Uses: Pornography Spam as Boundary Work, Susanna Paasonen.
Make Porn, Not War: How to Wear the Network’s Underpants, Katrien
Jacobs.
Can Desire Go On Without a Body?: Pornographic Exchange as Orbital Anomaly, Dougal Phillips.
CENSORED.
Robots.txt: The Politics of Search Engine Exclusion, Greg Elmer.
The Internet Treats Censorship as a Malfunction and Routes Around It?: A New Media
Approach to the Study of State Internet Censorship, Richard Rogers.
CODA
On Narcolepsy, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker.

Orders from Hampton Press:

http://tiny.cc/3qniv

as well as bookstores and online sellers.

Launch event:

Goldsmiths College, London:

Friday, September 25th, 6-8pm (prompt)

Room 3/4

Ben Pimlott Building, (silver building with squiggle) Goldsmiths, Lewisham Way New Cross

Contributors to the book will make short interventions based on their texts:

Matthew Fuller

Andrew Goffey

Steve Goodman

Jussi Parikka

Luciana Parisi

Sadie Plant

Tony Sampson

Editors:

Dr Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media Theory and History at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. He has a PhD in Cultural History from University of Turku, Finland and is now the co-director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture. He is the author of Digital Contagions – A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007). More info: http://www.jussiparikka.com , [email protected], mobile: + 44 (0)7846 476 425.

Dr Tony D. Sampson is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in New Media at The University of East London. He has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex. More info: http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/T.D.Sampson/research.htm, email: [email protected]

__________________________________________________
Dr Jussi Parikka

Reader in Media Theory & History

Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture (ArcDigital)

Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

http://www.jussiparikka.com

http://www.anglia.ac.uk/arcdigital

http://machinology.blogspot.com/

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