54 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
term was first applied to cases where a single message would be
sent to many recipients, as when a company sends out an ad to
everyone on a mailing list, producing electronic ‘junk-mail’. It later
came to be used for the complementary situation – the sending of
many messages to one user, as when a group of people electroni-
cally lobby a politician or attack a company’s policy.^41 Either way,
people find themselves having to deal with quantities of unwanted
text.
Not all spam is the same, either in intention or effect. Charles
Stivaleidentifiesthreetypescommoninvirtualworlds:playful,per-
nicious, and ambiguous.^42 Playfulspamming occurs when visual
or audio effects (such as a duck quacking) have been programmed
to turn up in the text, unasked-for, at intervals within the game sit-
uation. It can also be found when one character does something ag-
gressivelyplayfultoanother(abonk–butnotintheUKsense,please
note),^43 thereby eliciting a vociferous response. In some game situ-
ations (especially MOOs), several participants may simultaneously
respond to a playful stimulus, producing a sequence of text mes-
sages on screen which come in so fast that they can hardly be read.
Perniciousspamming refers to the Internet equivalent of real-life
harassment, often involving sexually explicit language and descrip-
tion of actions, and usually prompting the introduction of control
measures of some kind by the group moderators. Lengthy aggres-
sive utterances (flaming– see below) are often involved.Ambigu-
ousspamming falls between these extremes. A participant might
repeatedly send a message which irritates other players, or cause
another player to do something unlooked-for (e.g.Sting throws
Moog out of the plane) or be sent to another ‘room’ in the game
(such as ‘Prison’). The ambiguity lies in the fact that the intention
behind the spam may be unclear, and the effect variously unpre-
dictable. What counts as spam is often a matter of taste; as Marvin
(^41) A further distinction is the sending of many messages to a server in an attempt to shut it
down – what is usually referred to as amailbomb.The automatic deletion of spam mail
42 is known asblackholing.
43 Stivale (1996).
AsThe New Penguin English Dictionary(2000) intriguingly puts it: ‘bonk,verb trans
informal 2 Britto have sexual intercourse with (somebody)’.