Flame wars are endemic to the written Internet. With societal restraints removed, and far fewer audible or visual cues to pick up on to realise that someone’s not being entirely serious, one misunderstanding or less than artful phrasing can quickly cause a mild disagreement to snowball into a spittle-flecked mass outburst of opprobrium and hatred.
This much we’ve known for a while. I read somewhere that one mailing list operator prevented flame wars by the very simple method of delaying emails by 5 minutes. By the time you got the snarky reply to your snarky comment, you’d probably cooled down, and calm heads prevailed.
Of course, nobody emails any more; these days, all the cool kids are using Facebook and Twitter. And we find ourselves needing to learn the same lessons again.
Last Sunday (Easter Sunday, when pretty much everyone at Amazon was on holiday), some people on the Internet suddenly noticed that a metric shitload of gay- and lesbian-themed books had suddenly effectively vanished from Amazon’s searches and sales rankings. Twitter was suddenly engulfed by a flurry of #amazonfail posts; for more information see Making Light and its comment thread. See also Moments in Time - and again - for a whole plethora of other links.
As soon as Amazon management got back to work, it became apparent that the whole thing was in fact a stupid mistake caused by a data entry / business logic over-reaction that went horribly wrong. And in retrospect, although you can argue that the very fact that whole sections of gay- and lesbian-friendly literature were catalogued the way they were made them peculiarly vulnerable to mass-delisting, this is arguably something that could have happened to any company. One mistake, no matter how dramatic its consequences, doesn’t automatically turn a previously reasonable and tolerant company into a seething morass of homophobia and bigotry.
Clay Shirky reflects on the whole debacle (via Daring Fireball):
I have been thinking about the internet as hard as I can for the better part of two decades, and for the latter half of that time, I’ve been thinking about the problems of categorization systems, and it never occurred to me that the possible explanation for systemic bias might be something having to do with a technological system instead of a human one, that a changed classification in the Amazon database could trigger the change in status of tens of thousands of books.
I assumed (again, vaguely) that Amazon themselves had not adopted an anti-gay posture, and I recognized the possibility that this might be a trolling attack, but the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me. This isn’t because I am a generally stupid person; it was because I was, on Sunday, a specifically stupid person. When a lifetime of intellectual labor and study came up against a moment of emotional engagement, emotion won, in a rout.
As the old-school bloogers say, read the whole thing. I mean, you should read Clay Shirky if you’re at all interested in the Internet and smart people anyway, and I’m not entirely sure why I don’t have him in my RSS reader didn’t have him in my RSS reader until just now.
I found myself seeking out friends or colleagues of mine that were on Twitter today. I can see the appeal (and the time-sink) of microblogging, but I think we need to be aware of the limitations of the medium. And not just because URL shorteners destroy the Internet.
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