Things That Don’t Go Away – Tempest in a Tweet

    
I’m going to take a pause from the usual theme of this column, to talk about something that does in fact look to be going away.

I’ll call it the Age of Isolation.

I found myself kicking through the ruins this week on my way to an electronic mob.

Yep, it was in fact the Amazon Thing.

For those of you who don’t know, earlier this week some books on Amazon.com started being stripped of their sales ranking. This is a problem because unranked books are not displayed on the all-important bestseller lists, and/or may not come up as readily during general searches as ranked books. They are, in effect, hidden at the bottom of the electronic pile. But what really lit the fire was that the books this was happening to were ones with GBLT or “adult” themes. And what piled fuel on that fire was that while this was all going on, if you went to Amazon.com and did a search on “gay” what came up was a book on how to cure yourself of being homosexual.

I know there have been other Internet Storms, but this was the first one that I wound up participating in. There I was, on the phone with a friend, while at the same time checking LJ updates and new emails from other writers (which were arriving in batches of six and seven) and chasing down link after link trying to get the straight story from a trustworthy source. All that connection, and all that anger, and no clear picture of what was going on, except that there was a rally happening at the speed of thought. A petition went up, people signed up, means of retaliation were proposed, word was spread, all faster than Amazon could stand up and yell “It was a glitch! A FRENCH GLITCH!”

I did have a feeling it would turn out to be nothing but a screw up gone wild, especially once people started reporting in on how random the de-listings were. Amazon’s a big corporation. If they’re going to implement a major policy shift, they’re going to have thought it out before hand and implement it much more cleanly than what was going on.

But at the time, I mostly felt dizzy. I still do, and I freely admit I’m still trying to sort out exactly what happened here.

Not with Amazon. What happened on Amazon’s end was nothing more or less one of those nightmare mistakes that can happen to a large business.

I’m talking about out in the community, with the readers and the writers. With the Us.

That thousands of people chose to rally around what looked like a censorship agenda that would have directly effected the lives and careers of fellow writers warms the cockles of my heart. But then, I agreed with the cause. What happened could very well have been some major corporate censorship. The owners of a store, of course, has every right to decide what they will and will not sell. Unfortunately, if the store (like, say WalMart) turns out to have a moral agenda that does not include carrying your material, it can have a major impact on a career. If WalMart won’t carry a book, it is more than possible that a publisher will decide not to carry an author. This can make a writer think twice before tackling a subject.

On the other hand, I admit freely, I would not have been nearly so enthusiastic if the books in question had been along the lines of say, oh, The Turner Diaries or Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I will also admit the word “mob,” drifted across my mind more than once while I was out chasing links and trying to assemble a coherent picture of the situation. There were a bunch of us, we were frightened and angry, and we had a target and we were ready to start lighting the torches. People were signing up on the spontaneously generated Twitter list Amazon Fail, in droves. I admit, I was glued to the keyboard. I didn’t want to miss anything, even though I was pretty sure it was just a screw up, I didn’t want to miss anything. I was caught. I was caught up. If there had been anywhere to march to, I probably would have gone. I like to think I wouldn’t have gotten out the pitchfork first, but I’m not entirely sure.

What we have now is not only a huge amount of rapidly available information but the awareness of that availability. That night we had all gotten virtually together to pool our resources to find out what the hell was happening, I real time. We were reaching out for answers, assembling and reassembling information on the fly, creating pictures, creating answers and new rumors as fast as we could type. We were operating on the theory that not only could we find the answer, we could and should do something when we had it.

And as we sat there making our new connections, sending out our new ideas and participating in new solutions, a whole body of old SF suddenly and vividly became alternate history. Seriously. A lot of classic science fiction is based entirely around the idea that information will be controlled, and people will be controlled along with it. It’s central to 1984, and also to Fahrenheit 451. It is, in fact, one of Ray Bradbury’s major themes. He wrote a large number of short stories about the dangers of the passive media and the destruction of the imagination accomplished through the destruction of books and the dominance of television which destroyed even the memory of the stories.

I’ve got to say it’s nice to see at least one form of dystopia become an impossibility. For better and for worse, connection now requires conversation and active participation. People expect the right to respond.

Now, the prediction has been made that because the internet and social networking makes it possible to sub-divide into so many niches, people would just retreat to their own comfy niches and never hear an alternate opinion. But that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening, or, at least, that’s not the only thing that’s happening. A growing number of people are starting to latch onto a subject and seek out all the views they can find on it. Then, once they’ve found and formed views, they get to work recreating and reshaping them.

We don’t have to wait to be told anymore. In fact, we refuse to wait to be told anymore. We’re going out and hunting down that answer. And what we do with it…well, answers are tools and whether tools are good or bad depends on the use you put them to. Now that we all seem to have access to the answers, that’s going to be up to us all to decide.

I don’t have a tidy wrap-up for this one. Only an increased sense that I am living in the future, and, like Yoda told us, it is always in motion.

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