TY - JOUR 
A1 - Jiménez Bernal, Miriam
AU - Belli, Simone
AU - Pacheco Rueda, Marta
T1 - Virtual ethnography and spam. Fraud and Fear in deceptive narratives on the Internet
Y1 - 2013
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/11268/2285
AB - With just couple of clicks, Internet users are able to send messages to several people
at the same time in a fast, handy and cheap way. If we add the possibility of remaining
anonymous, we are creating a wonderful scenario for spammers.
The main aim of this paper is to present briefly how fear contributes to the
construction of deception through the spam narratives. Our virtual ethnography
suggests a parallelism between the re‐production of gender stereotypes in the new
communication tools and the same stereotypes found in traditional fairytales, so we
will focus on how fear, understood as a continuum, connects spam and fairytales, and
how this parallelism and the gender stereotypes found in both kinds of texts can
interact with the linguistic mechanisms used by spammers to make their stories
believable.
The corpus we have used for this research contains approximately 450 emails,
between four and fifty‐two lines extension, written in English, Spanish and French, and
received between late 2009 and mid‐2011. The structure usually consists of a
presentation, a reason for the contact, a justification, a request or response data or a
farewell. These emails are signed by men and women, but the real identity of
individuals who send these mails or promote its delivery remains unknown. In this
communication, we will present and analyze some of the most representative mails.
Our analysis will be based in tools and concepts provided by Applied Linguistics and
Critical Discourse Analysis, without forgetting the gender perspective. 
KW - Internet
KW - Psicología social
LA - eng
ER -