The Big Bad Book Blog

In the wake of the controversy surrounding Amazon.com’s debacle, in which they first claimed books with “adult” content were being de-ranked, then  called it a computer glitch, then retracted that and called it a cataloguing error, and so forth, I thought we might take a moment to consider the nature of the controversy itself. For those who considered it controversy, the name of the game is censorship. Or should that be Censorship? It is a Very Important Topic, after all.

I don’t mean to make light of the topic, or people’s responses to it—outrage and furor and apathy and acceptance and the entire spectrum of it—so much as I make light of how we display our responses. Censorship tends to evoke negative reactions. But to see how we communicate this in a world enamored with social media does cause in me a mild feeling of alarm and a very strong instinct to brood in a corner with a mug of hot chocolate, a notebook and a pen (a pursuit with which I am quite intimate).

As an active social networker, I witnessed firsthand the Twitter-based #amazonfail. (In Plainspeak, people on Twitter using a tag to identify the subject of their conversations, in this case Amazon.com.) I found it almost surreal to see peoples’ reactions reduced to highly punctuated 140-character bursts of emotion. We need only type a sentence and a protest is sparked.

Perhaps that is a bit hyperbolic. continue reading