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 theory.

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. On Narcolepsy, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker. Notes. About the Authors. Author Index. Subject Index.