Whew, back from an interesting week; in the first half, Kathryn Greenhill was visiting Equinox and GPLS, which was great fun; Sandy and I sped up to Atlanta late Sunday afternoon. We then zoomed back Wednesday so I could flap my wings and fly to Vancouver to present (and meet some Evergreeners) at the British Columbia Library Association conference, returning late Saturday night. My poor old laptop began failing on the latter trip, adding to the “excitement.”
While I was on the road, the Twitterverse got into an uproar over some strange delisting of GLBT titles on Amazon, with much finger-pointing and flinging of scarves and whatnot. This was called AmazonFAIL, for the hashtag that was appended to a million angry tweets.
The disadvantage of microblogging is the tendency toward microthinking coupled with hairtrigger reactions. I posted twice about Amazonfail; in one tweet I mused, “@RonHogan perhaps pubs are slow to respond to #amazonfail becuz they are gathering info? I like the rogue insider theory.”
But why gather facts? Far more fun for the nattering chorus of the Twitterverse — a quilting bee that can work itself into a buzz in no time — to scream, “Crucify Amazon!” Did Amazon make mistakes? Undoubtedly. The biggest mistake was not to have a presence on Twitter — an officer for tweeting to monitor and react to the gathering storms. In this, Amazon was tragically unprepared (in a way that Dell, Comcast, Zappos, and other companies are not unprepared).
Note that often it is the unofficial presences — the real people and voices — that are most effective on the social networks — though that itself gets complex, as we see below.
But a week later and the easily-distractable Twitterverse has trotted off in new directions. To really understand what happened would take more than a few cool-kid tweets. It would take the kind of measured, thoughtful investigation that is increasingly undervalued, even by “information specialists” such as librarians.
Meanwhile, I’m off to Amazon to order vacuum cleaner bags. (Oops! Did I accidentally slip a book in my order?)
You Cannot Crowdsource Individuality
Whenever people romanticize the “hive mind” and social networking, I am reminded of a couple of things.
The first is that there have been any number of times when the majority has been wrong (pace the reelection of George Bush — we’ll give 2000 a pass, since he didn’t win that one, in my opinion).
I also tweeted this week that we do not live in the aggregate, we live in the particular. This was in response to a comment from Clay Shirky about how Wikipedia “works.” Wikipedia “works” the way high school “worked.” In other words, power and popularity will nearly always trump quality and individuality. Do I use Wikipedia quite a bit? I do. But I also attended high school every day. Some things are unavoidable.
My comment also applies more broadly to what I see as the disturbing crowd-mentality trends of new social networks.
Oh, the social networks. Overall, I hated high school, except for a handful of sui generis outliers who I am now catching up with online and who have had the best revenge — interesting, satisfying lives. Now I seem to be back in high school, only worse. The social networks too often have short memories, trigger reactions, and even more horribly, crowd mores. We’re on our way to the Precious Moments Interweb I have always dreaded… a bland, fast-food “community.”
Beer and Censorship
Then I noticed a couple of posts had come in on my post about the sexism — and more crucially, censorship — of homebrewtalk.com. Q.v.:
“I’m sorry you got a bad impression of HBT (homebrewtalk.com) on your visit. It IS a very male-heavy hobby, but I’ve never been treated with anything but welcome and generosity by the members of the board. I guess it helps if you have a ribald sense of humor and can handle a combination of 1)male flattery and 2) tongue-in-cheek sexism.”
This is what we call the big lie. I hung around this board for several weeks before exploring the “premium” membership and posting my critique. I didn’t have a problem with homebrewtalk.com; the forum moderators — call it a “board” if you like it, but it’s a company run for a profit — are the fainting lilies that censored MY posts.
In other words, homebrewtalk.com can dish it out — charging $100 for a private forum with special access to wimmin with big bezooms, yucking it up on the boards — but like most sexists, they can’t take what was really fairly mild criticism (because then it’s just not fun for them any more). And I should give them my money because..?
(Having saved $100, I spent $43 on a membership in the American Homebrewing Association, which among other things advocates for legalizing homebrewing. Libertarians take notice!)
Posted on this day, other years:
- Invasion of the Technocrats - 2006
- Moving and Shaking and Shameless Hussies - 2006
- But is it Good for the Episcopalians? - 2005
- New Appeal for Cuban Librarians Launched - 2004
30 years ago, or so (some time before I dabbled in homebrewing), the Ontario government expected one to acquire a homebrewing license. From what I understand, this required a one-time payment of some nominal amount ($25 or less, as I recall) with nothing required beyond the ability to fill out the application.
Did you have to give a local councilmember a sample?
I have no idea. I learned about the (by then repealed) need for a license from the gentleman in the brewing supply store. I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t necessary, since having a meaningless official license would have been kinda fun.
It seems there was a substantial difference in the Amazon-failure discussion on Twitter and its discussion on blogs. I saw some of the blog discussion (and found much of the discussion that didn’t seem to be specifically looking back on Twitter conversations to be sensible and on-point), but saw none of the Twitter discussion firsthand.
It might be interesting to try to tease out the reasons for this difference. I’m not sure the difference can be entirely attributed to the length of messages (though it’s certainly easier to fire off something off the cuff in a 140-char text).
It also sounds like all the discussion on Twitter was effectively happening in a single, unmoderated, forum, which can increase the noise level for participants in both long- and short-form forums (as seen in unmoderated Usenet groups on controversial issues.) Blogs, on the other hand, spread out the conversation, and it’s easier to control what kind of conversation you participate in. (Both on the writer’s and the reader’s end. Blog authors often choose or moderate their comments; and readers choose which blogs they find worth their attention and participation. There could have been a lot of the same sort of unthinking responses reportedly on Twitter going on in the blogosphere as a whole, but if so, it would largely have been in places I didn’t read.)
You could in theory have a microblogging (i.e. ultrashort) medium that has some more of the selectivity you find in the “conventional” blogosphere. Twitter isn’t that medium, but something else that came along could be. (If it got used enough, anyway. Right now I suspect people find Twitter to be lower overhead than such an environment would be and thus more convenient. Though that could change as usage scales up or otherwise shifts.)
People gravitate towards stories that explain things, so conspiracy theories flourish when there is no data. Whether it is #amazonfail or the grassy knoll or creationism, we just want stories. “Somebody screwed up” just isn’t an interesting story, though it is almost always the right first guess.
I just renewed my AHA membership lately. I’m not sure what it means but I feel like my dollars there went to more than when I was an ALA member. I got a cool magazine, got access to a useful forum, get good deals on various brewpubs/food/beer, and could go to some pretty cool events if I wasn’t so lazy. Even cooler, I could follow the various legal battles for homebrewers rights through an interesting group of podcasts and publications. Sadly, I have a hard time thinking of an equivalent group in ALA. :(.
(Walter… you mean creationism isn’t true? I’m originally a FISH?!) I like your explanation… and it combines well with John’s points, too. I have raised that point about people filling in stories in a variety of settings. One place it applies the most is the workplace. When people don’t have all the information, they are uncomfortable, so they begin inventing stuff. Where there isn’t a moderating force (e.g. on Twitter), they invent a lot of stuff… and microblogging is like two folks standing on a corner whipping each other up on an issue.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I use that all the time in my talks… it works on so many levels.
Jon, the Washington office of ALA does some marvelous advocacy on many fronts. They don’t advocate for decriminalizing homebrewing 🙂 but perhaps that can be considered out of scope! However, I concur on the usefulness of AHA. The list is excellent — one digest of very spot-on questions and answers every day. I tucked the membership card in my wallet and only a couple of days ago noticed that it says “This card entitles the bearer to participate in secret homebrewing rituals.”
David, I totally understand. When I do CE, even just to evaluate training, I always ask for the certificate, just to amuse myself.
So, if a public library in a state that forbids the private brewing of beer stocks and circulates Papazian’s book, are is it an accessory before the fact to a state felony? Does that make ALA advocacy in scope?
Actually, even in states where homebrewing is illegal, I don’t think it’s illegal to own the ingredients or the instruction manuals. It’s also not lawful for me to build a shed in my backyard without a permit (truly), but I can buy all the books on shed-building I want!
Oh, I meant more I don’t really see a group that forms around the ALA lobbying/legal efforts. (Except for the recent issue with the “lead tests”).
Part of the problem is that in communications from ALA these things frequently gets buried under tons of “We have new Reading Posters!”.
And, perhaps through a failing of my own, it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone communicating back to the ALA members in the manner like Basic Brewing or Homebrewing Perspective was doing. (You know, informative and also interesting and fun…) ALA needs a Douglas W! (Hey, he’s graduating at some point, right….?)
(And of course, I’m always over-critical of everything.)