The Rice University Neologisms Database

Garbage media forced under one’s nose, especially unsolicited advertising conveyed by any means Spam is the familiar canned meat of our youth; in the early 1990s, the word became associated with meritless posts to usenet groups, drawing on the public consciousness that spam is something of little value that no one actually wants to eat (or read, as the case may be). More recently (in the last year or two), spam has found use in contexts other than newsgroups. I don’t know who first applied gave this word its wonderful new meaning, but some word was obviously required to label the increasing usenet-clogging garbage, and spam was a great choice. This word has become so widely used that it has begun to escape the realm of internet lingo. I have seen this word so many times that I could not possibly say when I first encountered it, but I imagine it was coined several years ago. I have heard about web spam, email spam, phone spam, magazine spam, snailmail spam, and even TV spam. In this more modern sense, spam refers to anything interjected into a gen-xer’s life that he does not want to deal with, especially unsolicited advertising. The same process that led the word spam to be associated with usenet garbage has allowed it to be applied to media garbage in general.