On what I thought would be a laid back Easter Sunday, the internet exploded with scandal and Twitter users flexed their muscles to show corporate America a whole new version of consumer activism.
From a thwarted suicide attempt, to queryfail and now amazonfail, the microblogging social site Twitter has become the go to site to organize the virtual troops.
In the latest and by far the biggest Twitter outcry I have witnessed, readers and authors unhappy with Amazon's latest decision to strip "adult" books from their sales ranks and general searches, rallied together to let Amazon.com know just how pissed off they were by this decision.
Over the last week or so books categorized as erotica or GLBT were deranked including most of my own books. Not only did this restrict our books from the bestseller lists it made general searches for our books return no results. They didn't stop selling them but you have to drill down in the books category to find them. That is the glossed over summary. If you would like to read the entire topic you can go to http://search.twitter.com and type in #amazonfail. (be warned: last I heard there were over 75,000 tweets in that thread)
Thanks to the quick and easy use of twitter, people demanded action. From a petition against the change, other actions were taken such as the blog Smart Bitches Trashy Books, who started a Google bomb to redefine the term Amazon Rank which worked in just under four hours to celebrities getting involved by spreading the word to their hundreds of thousands of followers.
By Sunday evening, Amazon was reportedly claiming the issue as a glitch. But with two authors months apart receiving written responses from Amazon CS stating the change was because of a new adult policy, twitter users quickly added #glitchmyass to the #amazonfail topic.
So while I think there have been many blogs about the Amazon debacle my real point here isn't to highlight that issue but instead to get your opinion on the power of social networking sites like Twitter. In this political and economic climate the buzz words are all about change. So what happens when the power of Twitter users decide to take on bigger issues? Is it good? Bad? Or freaking awesome? I'd like to know what you think.
Eliza
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2 comments:
Like all social movements, it's not the power itself that is good, bad or indifferent, but how that power is used. To effect positive change? Fucking awesome. To target individuals or promote negativity? Fucking horrific. While I think the immediacy and size of the response to this, and the demand for Amazon to stop trying to censor reading through buying availability and categorization, is wonderful, I tremble to think that the wrong groups could use the power of it for projects or movements that are as negative as this one is positive. But that is the power and the perfidy of the internet in general, I suppose.
"With great power comes great responsibility."
It wows me and scares me all at the same time.
E
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