A Quote From Finn Brunton's
Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet
“Spamming is the project of leveraging information technology to exploit existing gatherings of attention.
Attention, the scarce resource of human notice, is what makes a community on the network, and the creation of communities, the invention of ‘we' on the Internet, is an act of attention. Communities and spam as a whole are projects in the allocation of attention, and spam is the difference—the shear—between what we as humans are capable of evaluating and giving our attention, and the volume of material our machines are capable of generating and distributing when taken to their functional extremes” (16).
Attention, the scarce resource of human notice, is what makes a community on the network, and the creation of communities, the invention of ‘we' on the Internet, is an act of attention. Communities and spam as a whole are projects in the allocation of attention, and spam is the difference—the shear—between what we as humans are capable of evaluating and giving our attention, and the volume of material our machines are capable of generating and distributing when taken to their functional extremes” (16).