[rohrpost] Announcing a new book on the dark side of network culture: THE SPAM BOOK

[Shintaro Miyazaki]

Weiterleitung..
(von Jussi Parikka, Autor von Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology  
of Computer Viruses” by Jussi Parikka (Peter Lang Books, 2007, 327  
pages)
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 , Jussi.parikka at anglia.ac.uk,  
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: t.d.sampson at uel.ac.uk


------------

Shintaro Miyazaki
miyazaki.shintaro at gmail.com

[Institute for Algorhythmics -
  Art and research project]
http://www.algorhythmics.com/

Pfluegerstr. 14, 12047 Berlin, Germany
mobile: +49 176 64 26 50 89