Constitutive interference: Spam and online communities

Representations

Volumn 117, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 30-58

  Brunton, Finn ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84858969981     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2012.117.1.30     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Denver, 1954), 184.
2. Lori Kendall, "Community and the Internet", in The Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. Robert Burnett, Mia Consalvo, and Charles Ess (Singapore, 2010), 309-25, 309.
3. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford, 1983), 76.
4. For an overview of the complex and contradictory ideas around "community", especially as it enters the virtual, see Allison Cavanagh, Sociology in the Age of the Internet (Maidenhead, UK, 2007), 102-19.
5. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (London, 1994), 5.
6. John Coate, "Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community", 1998. Revision available from author at http://cervisa.com/innkeeping.html.
7. " In those days", begins one of the many folk etymologies of the early chat systems, "a lot of people who didn't have a clue what to do to create conversation would just type in their favorite song lyrics, or in the case of people at tech schools like [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute], recite entire Monty Python routines verbatim. A particular favorite was the 'spam, spam, spam, spammity spam' one because people could just type it once and just use the up-arrow key to repeat it. Hence, 'spamming' was flooding a chat room with that sort of clutter." James Parry, message in discussion "Totally Spam? It's Lubricated" on alt.religion. kibology, September 2, 2003, http://groups.google.com/group/alt.religion. kibology/msg/ a89af63f065a35da?hl=en&dmode=source&pli=1.
8. Jon Postel, Request For Comments: 706: "On the Junk Mail Problem", Nov. 1975, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc706.txt;
9. for the self-replicating message, see Eric Raymond, "ARMM", in the Jargon File (no date, but see nomination and proposed text by Joel Furr posted in discussion "ARMM: ARMM: >>>>Ad Infinitum" on news. admin. policy on March 31, 1993: http://groups.google.com/group/news. admin. policy/msg/dc98a1f9c6a59477?hl=en), http://www.eps.mcgill.ca/jargon/ jargon. html#ARMM.
10. Elizabeth Hess, Yib's Guide to MOOing: Getting the Most from Virtual Communities on the Internet (Victoria, BC, 2003), 29.
11. Lee-Ellen Marvin, "Spoof, Spam, Lurk and Lag: the Aesthetics of Text-Based Virtual Realities", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 1, no. 2(1995), http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol1/issue2/marvin. html;
12. Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life (New York, 1998), 100.
13. Compuserve v. Cyber Promotions, Inc., 962 F. Supp. 1015 (S. D. Ohio 1997). In a moment of high legal surrealism the opinion includes the footnote "This term is derived from a skit performed on the British television show Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which the word 'spam' is repeated to the point of absurdity in a restaurant menu."
14. Alexander R. Galloway, "Position Paper", Exploring New Configurations of Network Politics, 2010, http://www.networkpolitics.org/ request-for-comments/alexanderr-galloways-position-paper.
15. Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010), passim.
16. Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC, 2008), 3, 30.
17. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems ("into existence": 126; "locate and identify": 141).
18. On new media and Iran, see Annabelle Sreberny, "Thirty years on: The Iranian Summer of Discontent", Social Text (2009), http://www. socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2009/11/thirty-years-on-the-iranian-summer-of- discontent.php;
19. on Facebook and privacy, see James Grimmelman, "Saving Facebook", Iowa Law Review 94(2009):1137-1206;
20. on Twitter and intellectual property, see Brock Shinen, "Twitterlogical: The Misunderstandings of Ownership", 2009, http://www.canyoucopyrightatweet.com/.
21. Lee A. Bygrave and Jon Bing, Internet Governance: Infrastructure and Institutions (Oxford, 2009), 50.
22. Or, as Bryan Pfaffenberger puts it in the case of free speech on Usenet, "The notion of free speech that we find in Usenet today cannot be fully understood by likening it to traditions of free speech developed in nontechnological settings; like Usenet itself, it's an artifact that took shape as competing groups struggled in a new technological arena"; Bryan Pfaffenberger, "'If I Want It, It's Okay': Usenet and the (Outer) Limits of Free Speech", Information Society 12, no. 4(1996), http://www. ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/utis/1996/00000012/00000004/art00002.
23. Google Inc., Securities Exchange Commission Form 10-Q, November 4, 2009, 23, http://investor.google.com/documents/20090930-google-10Q.html.
24. See DataPresser, http://www.datapresser.com.
25. "Google only pays you adsense revenue because they are making money", writes "The Junk Man", a manipulator of AdSense revenue, "and all they care about is keeping their customers happy. If your content is pin point and you are capturing the proper audience you are doing google's advertisers a favor.... That is what googles [sic] business revolves around!" thejunkman, "MNS: Bury the Hatchet", February 14, 2010, http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/adsense/171744-mns-bury-hatchet.html.
26. C. W. Anderson, "Deliberative, Agonistic, and Algorithmic Audiences: Journalism's Vision of Its Public in an Age of Audience Transparency", International Journal of Communication 5(2011), http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ ijoc/article/view/884.
27. See, for example, the presentation of the Google algorithm partially as a method for preventing gaming of the system: "Automated search engines that rely on keyword matching usually return too many low quality matches. To make matters worse, some advertisers attempt to gain people's attention by taking measures meant to mislead automated search engines.... 'Junk results' often wash out any results that a user is interested in"; Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Networks & ISDN Systems 30, no. 1-7(1998):107-17. Or the closely related paper on Web link analysis from the following year, in which we can see "spam" replacing "junk" in the lexicon: "Linkage on the Web represents an implicit endorsement of the document pointed to... several systems-e.g., HITS, Google, and Clever-recognize and exploit this fact for Web search. Several major portals also apparently use linkage statics [sic] in their ranking functions because, unlike text-only ranking functions, linkage statistics are relatively harder to 'spam'";
28. Ravi Kumar et al., "Trawling the Web for Emerging Cyber-Communities", Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking 31, no. 11-16(1999):1481-93.
29. Tom Van Vleck, "The History of Electronic Mail", 2008, http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html.
30. The documentary filmmaker and essayist Errol Morris conducted several fascinating interviews with Van Vleck and others connected with the history of time-sharing and e-mail: Errol Morris, "Did My Brother Invent E-Mail with Tom Van Vleck?" parts 1-5, New York Times, June 19, 2011, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invente-mail- with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/.
31. Brad Templeton, "Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978" (no date), http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html.
32. Kendall, "Community and the Internet", 310.
33. Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society", Village Voice, December 23, 1993.
34. Peter Kropotkin, "Law and Authority: An Anarchist Essay", in Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (Mineola, NY, 2002), 202.
35. Monroe E. Price and Stefaan G. Verhulst, Self-Regulation and the Internet (The Hague, 2005), 14.
36. For a fascinating overview of the early evolution of Usenet, including questions of social constraint (flaming) and the infrastructural/social problems involved with profiting from it, see Henry Edward Hardy, "The Usenet System", ITCA [International Teleconferencing Association] Yearbook, 1993 (McClean, VA, 1993), 140-51; available online at http://internet.eserver.org/ Hardy-Usenet-System.txt.
37. Matthew P. Wiener, message posted in discussion "Nebraska Letter" on news. misc on May 27, 1988, http://groups.google.com/group/news. misc/browse-thread/thread/c7b4c158caa1f579/b13590445e1fba94.
38. Pfaffenberger, "'If I Want It, It's Okay.'"
39. Bob Webber, message posted in discussion "FCC? U. S. Mail.? (Re: J J's Revenge-Part II) " on news.admin, June 1, 1988, http://groups.google. com/group/news. admin/msg/a702f4908ded4c89?hl=en.
40. Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace."
41. Customer Service at Portal Communications, message posted in discussion "J J's posting" on news.sysadmin, May 27, 1988, http://groups.google. com/group/news.sysadmin/msg/d8aed91249879fcf?hl=en.
42. Customer Service at Portal Communications, message posted in discussion "A Note From Portal Regarding the 'J J' Incident" on misc.misc, June 1, 1988, http://groups.google.com/group/misc.misc/msg/b44db800c9cc7d0a?hl=en.
43. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Boston, 1983), 21.
44. Bryan D. Palmer, "Discordant Music: Charivaris and Whitecapping in Nineteenth-Century North America", Labour/Le Travail 3(1978):5-62.
45. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London, 1887), 366-69.
46. For other projects that violate privacy and collectively produce public shame online, with varying approaches, goals, and histories, see Dongxiao Liu, "Human Flesh Search Engine: Is It a Next Generation Search Engine?" 3rd Communication Policy Research, South Conference, Beijing, China, 2008, http://ssrn. com/abstract=1555438
47. as well as Gabriella Coleman, "Old and New Net Wars over Free Speech, Freedom and Secrecy; or How to Understand the Hacker and Lulz Battle Against the Church of Scientology", lecture, Goldsmiths College, University of London, March 16, 2010, Internet Archive, "Community Audio", 58:39, http://www.archive.org/details/coleman-scientology-versus-the-internet.
48. Laurie Flynn, "'Spamming' on the Internet", New York Times, October 16, 1994.
49. Lawrence Canter and Martha Siegel, How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services (New York, 1994), 85.
50. *@) # Enlargements (Sebastopol, CA, 2005), 89 and 180.
51. On the lack of expertise among the Mariposa botnet programmers, see BBC News, "Spanish Police Arrest Masterminds of 'Massive' Botnet", March 3, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8547453.stm.
52. On the AOL address sale, see McWilliams, Spam Kings, 223. The world of ancillary products for the spam business is vast; the curious reader can begin with Captcha King, http://www.captchaking.com/;
53. the software cracking request team at Rent-a-Cracker, http://www.rentacracker.com/ (note how many of their cracked wares are for spam);
54. and ListGrabber and AutoMail, http://www.egrabber.com/ listgrabberstandard/automail.html.
55. Jani Patokallio, message posted in discussion "Result: News.admin. net-abuse Reorganization All Groups Pass", news.announce.newgroups, November 9, 1996, http://groups.google.com/group/news.announce.newgroups/msg/ 2f6588970 21a0a89?dmode=source.
56. "Sine Nomine", message posted in discussion "Proposed Press Release, 2nd draft", news.admin. misc, June 6, 1994, http://groups.google.com/group/news. admin. misc/msg/f4d20bfe170f5edd?hl=en.
57. Ken Hollis, "Alt.spam FAQ" (created 1995), http://gandalf.home. digital.net/spamfaq.html.
58. Jack L. Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford, 2006), 46.
59. Flynn, "'Spamming' on the Internet."
60. "You should also read Title 47 of the United States Code, Section 227. There is a FAQ at cornell.law.edu for the text of the law.... Sylfest tells us Norwegians should report these via email to the national taskforce on economical crime, the KOKRIM"; Hollis, "Alt.spam FAQ." Note that this document includes both guidance in the use of the legal system and reporting to authorities, as well as significant critique of the problems of proposed and existing antispam legislation. 51. The programmer Paul Graham captures the essential concern in one of his essays on spam filtering: "It's hard to pass effective laws against spam now, because there is a continuum of spammers, ranging from (ahem) 'permissionbased email marketers' like Virtumundo that send unsolicited email to addresses they buy from sites with unscrupulous privacy policies, to bottomfeeders like Alan Ralsky who send unsolicited email to addresses culled from web pages, chat rooms, and newsgroups.... The companies at the more legitimate end of the spectrum lobby for loopholes that allow the bottom-feeders to slip through too"; Paul Graham, "So Far, So Good", August 2003, http://www.paulgraham.com/ sofar.html.
61. As cited by Jeffery J. Leader and others in discussion "I'm Out!" on news.admin. net-abuse.email, April 11, 1998, http://groups.google. com/group/news.admin. net-abuse.email/browse-thread/thread/db1ce802d66ec505/.
62. Paul Graham, "A Plan for Spam", 2002, http://www.paulgraham. com/spam. html.
63. Christian Kreibich et al., "On the Spam Campaign Trail", Proceedings of the 1st Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats (LEET '08), 2008, http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full-papers/ kreibich/kreibich-html/.
64. David Dagon et al., "Modeling Botnet Propagation Using Time Zones", Proceedings of the 13th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS '06), 2006, http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/ndss/ 06/proceedings/papers/modeling-botnet-propagation.pdf.
65. Brian Krebs, "Host of Internet Spam Groups Is Cut Off", Washington Post, November 12, 2008.
66. For the gradual resumption of spam e-mail, see Brad Stone, "Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail", New York Times, March 31, 2009, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/spam-back-to-94-of-all-e-mail/.
67. Bygrave and Bing, Internet Governance, 2.
68. Estonia's "Internet war" was a complex event whose detailed history remains to be written; for an overview see Gadi Evron, "Battling Botnets and Online Mobs: Estonia's Defense Efforts During the Internet War", Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (Winter/Spring 2008): 121-26.
69. Geert Lovink, "Interview with Alan Liu", networkcultures.org, February 28, 2006, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/interview-with-alan- liu/.
70. On auto-retweeting in Twitter: Andrei Boutyline, personal communication. (Note that this automation is distinct from the human-based retweeting practices examined by danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan, "Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter", Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on Social Systems (HICSS 43), 2010, http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf.
71. On social network scams, a representative instance is that of Rakesh Agwaral as discussed by Graham Cluley, "See a Facebook Scam in Action", sophos4.com, January 22, 2009, http://www.sophos4.com/blogs/gc/g/ 2009/01/22/facebook-scam-actio/.
72. Rheingold, Virtual Community, 42.
73. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 38.
74. Matt Haughey, "Does Amazon Enable Comment Spam?" wholelottanothing.org, February 22, 2010, http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2010/ 02/does-amazonenable-comment-spam.html.
75. For Textbroker, see http://www.textbroker.com.
76. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 46.
77. Charles J. Stivale, "Spam: Heteroglossia and Harassment in Cyberspace", in Internet Culture, ed. David Porter (New York, 1997), 133-44, 136.
78. Jenna Burrell, "Problematic Empowerment: West African Internet Scams as Strategic Misrepresentation", Information Technology and International Development 4, no. 4(2008):15-30.
79. Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson, The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (Cresskill, NJ, 2009).
80. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles, 2009), 23.
81. Ian Baucom, "Financing Enlightenment, Part Two: Extraordinary Expenditure", in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago, 2010), 350.
82. J. C. R. Licklider, "Some Reflections on Early History", in A History of Personal Workstations, ed. A. Goldberg (New York, 1988), 115-40.