Running head: BOOK RELATIONSHIP WITH READINGS

Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet by Finn Brunton

Name

Institution of Affiliation
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Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet by Finn Brunton

Spam has had an extraordinary impact on the world of internet with virtually everyone

who has used the internet having encountered it in one way or another. In his book, Brunton

(2013) discusses spam and its effect on digital technology, including its impact on laws, cultures,

economies, and languages. Reflecting on the class readings, the book provides details about

spam and its dark history in information technology. Spamming encompasses a wide variety of

bad behavior, malfeasance, and exploitation with the various spam terminologies branching out

into explicit domains from “419 spam” to phishing, to content farms, flood bots, link farms, and

splogs. Rather than being a force of nature, spam is a product of particular populations

distributed across the globe, including government officials, sysadmins, identity thieves, hackers,

marketers, pill merchants, con artists, lawyers, cops, programmers, bots, and their botmasters.

The book provides an understanding of what spam is, how it works, and its history from the

earliest computer networks to modern-day digital technology.

Spam developed in three distinct periods as it accompanied the advancement in computer

technology. The first one was between the 1970s and 1995 when the internet became privatized,

and spam emerged in the Green Card lottery message on Usenet. The next one was from 1995 to

2003 when the Can-Spam Act was approved in the United States. In this period, spam underwent

massive diversification following the innovations on the internet and the web. The most recent

phase from 2003 involves the use of algorithms by antispammers to block spamming messages.

Having analyzed its history, Burton (2013) explains spam as any use of information technology

resources to abuse the online human aggregations. He portrayed an obverse portrait of spam and

its shadow history with the internet. Spam serves both commercial and non-commercial purposes

while they can be made from both human and non-human sources. They attack networks of both
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limited and unlimited bandwidths. Therefore, spam is significant in information technology, and

its understanding is imperative to future progress in computer science.

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References

Brunton, F. (2013). Spam: A shadow history of the Internet. Mit Press.