Brunton, an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, provides a detailed and informative cultural history of spam, from the “first protospam message,” sent on May 1, 1978, to contemporary malware. Along the way, readers learn about the nature of communication, networking, and community self-policing. While this is not a programming and software treatise, it should prove interesting and informative to readers from a broad range of disciplines.

The history of spam is divided into three periods: 1971 to 1994, 1995 to 2003, and 2003 to 2010. The first period coincides with the growth of the online community, the second phase involves financial activity and early regulation, and the third covers continuing regulation and the development of targeted malicious activities. The early development initiated a struggle to define the content and values of the online community with “shame” and “flame.”

The second period describes an era of legal regulations such as CAN-SPAM, contrasted with the simultaneous encouragement of Internet marketing. Advance-fee frauds move from paper to the Internet. Positively, the growing mass of content necessitates the development of search engines.

In the third period, spam becomes increasingly automated and sophisticated, with human and machine collaborations not unlike the historic “Turk,” a mechanical chess player. The interesting electronic arms race between spammers and sites such as Craigslist unfolds in this era.

The current period is marked by botnets and spam carrying computer viruses. This in turn fosters the military applications of spam.

Brunton concludes that “spam is the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention.” Might this be turned into tools that respect our finite time and attention and help us organize information? That is the open question and challenge.

Brunton has produced pure text without cute pictures or drawings. This suits the serious treatment of a serious topic, as do the footnotes, bibliography, and detailed index. Combining communication and technology, this book is worth our study for what it tells us about the nature of human interactions mediated by machine. Brunton demonstrates how an unintended consequence accompanies all progress. This is an important book, not only to illuminate the past, but to stimulate the mind of the forward-thinking reader.

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