Spam represents quintessential digital waste. Few would deny that. And although it hasn't been in existence for very long, it's certainly gained notoriety as a scourge of the internet and online existence. It transgresses our systems of private correspondence not only with unsolicited advertising and bulk, generic communications that waste time and attention, but it also has a dark side. It is used to trick innocent users into giving over their private information by directing them to fraudulent websites. It is a contributor to identity theft, pyramid schemes and scams, placebo pills, penny stock rackets, and a range of pornographic content on the web. Spammers frequently take over dormant blogs and wikis and other social networks sites and fill them with message-template data, often with pornographic pictures and so on. Others, not knowing this was done by spammers, might take away a negative impression of the person whose blog has been invaded, falsely attributing the content to the author, rather than to a bot. Furthermore, spam is used to transfer viruses and worms, such as Trojans, that can incapacitate the computer, or worse, make it a zombie serving to spam others. It gets into inboxes, copying addresses of personal friends and then spams them, making it appear to be from a trusted friend, none of which aids in developing secure online social networks. It is big surprise the first time you recieve spam email from yourself! Spam is also used to jam communications channels with so much information that normal correspondence can no longer take place. There is a fairly famous example of a large botnet, known as the Storm botnet, which at its peak was capable of shutting down government online communications of the Estonian nation for a month in 2007. I have also been the unfortunate victim of what is known in email jargon as a DDoS attack, which stands for Distrubted Denial of Service, in which case one receives so many messages that it fills one's mail server to capacity and makes it no longer useful. For a week in April 2008 my primary communication medium no longer worked, in the midst of many professional correspondence obligations. It was an object lesson in why spammers are so hated by the general public and by server administrators the world over. Mind you, it couldn't have happened to a spammier guy! I received in the space of a week more data for my research than I'd accumulated over 9 months of collecting spam from spam traps set up all over the web.

But there is another side to spam, one that I am particularly fascinated by. This is what spam contributes to language, and in particular, to the evolution of online discourse. It may come as a surprise, but I would boldly assert the spam texts used to foil spam filters are poetic in nature and taken as a totality (and herein we'd need to recognize that billions of messages are sent every day) it is the largest cut-up poem ever created, and the most multiauthored work of literature in the English language. Positing spam as a literary genre is sure to raise heckles, especially if one holds onto habits of regarding print-authorship as the standard vehicle, and qualification of poetry. However, among online literary communities such a claim would not seem as surprising or new. Now some ten years old, a subgenre of poetry called "spoetry" and offshoots such as "flarff" have attracted hundreds of cyber poets and reading into the literary flock. A simple search on YouTube for example will show hundreds of readings and media performances from spam texts. In addition small presses in Canada, Europe and Scandanvia have been publishing print versions of spam generated texts. This is a fascinating cycle through the media, integrating a peculiar new form of poetry in which humans and bots are equal participants, into contemporary literary culture. Spoetry is an offshoot of found poetry that has existed, in a variety of media, since the early 20th Century, with the work of Dada artists, Marcel Duchamp, and surrealists, using found objects and texts in their artistic productions. A further exploration of found and procedural poetry is contained in my paper entitled "Cut-up consciousness and talking trash: Poetic inquiry and the Spambot’s text" in The Handbook on Poetic Inquiry (2009) edited by fellow poetic researchers Carl Leggo, Monica Pendergast and Pauline Sameshima. However, the found texts in the case of spam poems are not just selected from the world of published textual artifacts. The texts that are discovered by these spoets are already found poems, harvested and cut up by web-crawlers, bots that collect text that matches a users own lexicon and language use, in order to fool Bayesian filtering algorithms into thinking that the spam message is ham (legitimate correspondence), and, in the more extreme case, when training filters to elimate this kind of falsified message, these body texts that enigmatically accompany the spammer's pitch, can cause the filter to over-perform, resulting in false positives, i.e. the rejection of desired correspondence on the basis that it uses language associated with spam emails. Next page