My reply to Clay Shirky on #amazonfail
Clay’s post The failure of #amazonfail admits that over the weekend, he jumped to conclusions, “believed things that weren’t true” about Amazon and was “intoxicated” by the hashtag. He now thinks he was wrong. Most of the post is written in the first person plural, assuming everybody else reacted as he did. He concludes that “we” should apologize to Amazon. Here’s my reply, originally posted as a comment.
Update: aemeliaclare says it far better than me on Barely and Widely, as does Mike Edwards. Many of the commenters in Clay’s thread have good things to say as well. On Twitter, by contrast, the backlash is out in force, with many positive responses to “the great Shirky”.
Update on April 16: Janet D. Stemwedel’s Morality, outrage, and #amazonfail: a reply to Clay Shirky on Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Andrew Sempere’s Why Shirky Missed the Point on A repository of ten thousand indignities and the harbinger of God knew what are two more examples of “saying it better than me”. Nadia Cooke’s On the resolution of #amazonfail on The Ink Spectrum and Landon Bryce’s It’s Still On: The real failure of Amazonfail, Dubai, and Internet Outrage on Bookkake aren’t phrased as replies to Shirky, but make some very complementary points.
By contrast, Meg Pickard’s Spreading like wildfire: Twitter, Amazon and the social media mob focuses on what she sees as “ugly, prejudiced, underinformed, sneery, rude, kneejerk activity” on Twitter and sees it as “Destructive. Damaging. Virulent. Unapologetic. Unrelenting.” Sigh.
My replies to Clay and Meg below the fold.