Genres of Spam: Expectations and Deceptions

This paper is a pilot study that explores how the concept of genre can be applied to the massive set of digital documents known as ‘spam’. The authors studied 300 spam messages collected over 15 weeks from a university email system. Messages were coded based on content, form and specific features as well as on the manifest relationship to existing genres of communication. The paper argues that spam is not a single genre but many genres. For the most part, the genres evoked in spam are adaptations of print to Internet, including information artifacts, pamphlets, business cards, order forms, bulletins, advertisements, and "Nigerian letters". With spam, however, the concept of genre operates at several levels. Often, there is a contradiction between the manifest genre and the underlying purposes. The paper concludes that spam exploits genre by conforming to known forms while at the same time breaching those norms.