Most people come into contact with spam every day that they are online without giving it a second thought; e-mail offers of male enhancement pills, unclaimed millions and requests for bank details are generally deleted virtually automatically. Spam has become an accepted part of our online lives, noticeable only when the spam filters fail: when our e-mail or search engine results become filled with useless information, or conversely, when important e-mails are consigned to the junk folder or we struggle to prove our humanness to a CAPTCHA. Only then might the web user consider how the war between spam and the spam filters is progressing. But, as is clear from SPAM: A Shadow History of the Internet, the battle between spam and spam filters is one that will not only continue to evolve, but also one that should be welcomed.
In SPAM Brunton explores what spam is and isn’t, and how it is continually evolving to exploit people's attention. Neither the web nor the Internet were designed with spam in mind, but rather were designed for use by a research community that generally was not expected to be phishing for colleagues’ bank details or trying to sell drugs for male enhancement. However, the problem of spam predates both the web and the Internet and is embedded in our idea of freedom of speech itself, and as such will continue to be with us as people look to exploit the freedoms of new technologies. As technological solutions struggle with the subjective categorisation of what is and isn’t spam, and political solutions struggle to find an appropriate pre-web metaphor to encapsulate the diverse nature of spam, Brunton describes a rich and dynamic environment that ranges from the legal to the illegal and from the manual to the automatic.
Spam is part of the culture of the Internet and has undoubtedly contributed to the dynamic and diverse place the Internet is today. If we are to recognise the fact that the web was not invented at one point in time by one man, but rather has evolved in multiple different ways, then we need to understand not only the success stories of Facebook, Amazon and the very public faces of the big internet companies, but also need to understand some of the many other thousands of people who have also influenced the structure of the web. Brunton provides as good a place as any to start.
