Reality Bypass

Knee Jerk Reactions in the Twitterverse April 13, 2009

Hello there gentle reader.  Yes, I’m blogging twice in one day.  It doesn’t happen often, but I’m annoyed so here we go again.

To catch up those who might not know over the weekend there was a mistake made at Amazon which caused books with ‘adult’ content to be deranked on the search engine.  So when you searched for something like “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” it wouldn’t ever come up and definitely wouldn’t come up on the ‘you might like’ or ‘other books like this’ lists.  Pretty immediately there was a cry of outrage that erotic, GBLT and other such books were being ‘discriminated’ against.

Evil Amazon wouldn’t let people read the books they wanted to because they were marginalized!  Oh noes!  This lead to an explosion of conversation with the #amazonfail tag on Twitter, google bombing, name calling and general unpleasantness.  The joy of the internet is that the masses tend to be lead by whomever is shouting the loudest, particularly if they’re shouting about something which gets people up in arms anyway.

Today the news is that it was a mistake.  Not a policy, not a hack, not anything else sensational, but a mistake.  Someone clicked the wrong button.  Amazon was not trying to chop off the hands that feed it, but technological mistake made.  For a lot of people the admission isn’t enough.  It’s just not possible that there ISN’T a conspiracy.  Now there are new hash tags showing up in Twitter to keep the anger flowing, and I just don’t get it.

From a technical point of view the data deselection makes the most sense and as a Quality Assuance Engineer I can attest that this kind of thing happens.  I know I can turn off all of a product of a given nature in the systems I work on just that easily.  One sql statement, one deselected button and it all goes buh bye because of the nature of databases.  Amazon has a huge task in keeping all of the data on all of the products they carry sorted and easy to search.  Such a database has to be tabled and maximized for efficiency and sometimes the very maximizing which causes efficiency also opens up problems just like this.  I think it’s a shame that we have created a situation where we are so quick to jump up and down and scream that we’re being ‘injured’, but not so quick to give anyone, particularly a company which most of us use FREQUENTLY the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe it’s a reflection of the economy, of the distrust created by companies and goverments, or just flat human nature.  It’s more fun to bitch and moan than it is to be patient and wait and see.  Yeah, Amazon should have said something official sooner, but that’s also the bane of a large company.  You can’t do anything ‘official’ until all of the right parties have been talked to and everyone understands the situation.  They look like bigger idiots when there are several ‘official’ statements which rise to the top or unofficial statements which everyone jumps on, which we’re seeing in this too.

In the end no one ‘wins’ these things and it’s kinda sad to watch the state of the human pack.

And before I get slapped around as being pro censorship let me assure you that is not the case.  I think ‘adult’ books serve a purpose and they should not be deranked, but I also think that people enjoy building a conspiracy and seem leery of a simple solution, though Ocham’s Razor states that the simple solution most often is the right one.

Jana