Calling Them Out

IRL, in real life, if you were mad at someone for something, would you walk into the village square, face the buildings, and start yelling that person’s name and your complaints about them? You’d be calling them out, physically, demanding that they change their ways and accusing them of wrongdoing in front of passersby and traffic. Sound like a plan to you?

We’re going to come back to that nightmarish scenario. It has the feel of something from The Twilight Zone, doesn’t it? Hold onto that.

Today, as my Provocation in Publishing for you, I want to ask you to consider just that: our provocations in publishing, and the shared space in which we conduct them online, a pretty glassy house.

How do we disagree with each other? And why do we provoke each other in the ways we do?

In recent weeks, this topic has been gaining attention. The level of concern is rising. Three examples.

(1) Howling at Howey. As Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select put its new per-page payout scheme into place early this month, the author Hugh Howey completed a full year of weighing whether to participate fully and to accept the exclusivity required. While he originally was given a limited-time special arrangement to try Kindle Unlimited (KU) without the exclusivity requirement a year ago, he has made it clear that he enjoys no such exemption now. And Amazon’s change to the per-page payout structure — he calls this “KU 2.0″ — has persuaded him to go in:

All of my novels and stories are now in Kindle Unlimited (KU).

I wrote about this at The Bookseller’sThe FutureBook, which I manage as its associate editor. (Our weekly live #FutureChat on Twitter is today at 11 a.m. New York / 4 p.m. London time, you’re always welcome to join us if you like.) And I noted then that Howey was taking some powerful flak from followers, some of them castigating him as a turncoat for making a decision they didn’t like. He suggested at one point that the new plan would base payments on reader satisfaction. “If your income goes down, someone more deserving is seeing their income go up.” As it turns out, one of his readers had no interest in hearing this:

Did you really just say that? I used to have respect for you… that’s gone now. How dare you say that authors who have been busting their balls to make a living at this career that they are not deserving! I write romance, have been making a decent income since 2014, not spectacular by any means but my readers love what I write and yet because my income is set to go down in KU 2.0 I am not worth shit?

“The quickest way to get a thread blocked at KBoards these days,” Howey wrote to fellow author Alan Tucker, “seems to be to mention me, have me start a thread, or have me butt into a thread.” Howey wrote that he was leaving the Kindle Boards forums. He’d had enough. And Howey hardly needs those forums as much as they’ve needed him, of course. Not only isWool  being re-scripted by Nicole Perlman for 20th Century Fox, but his novel Sand has been optioned for development as a TV series by Imperative Entertainment.

(2) Reforming Reddit. Just this week, following Ellen Pao’s departure, the newly returned co-founding CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, is proposing a slate of reforms meant to change the hate-ridden reputation of the long-running platform and its “subreddit” communities. This is from Matt Weinberger’s report at Business Insider, quoting Huffman:

“There is…a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don’t have any obligation to support them. And we also believe that some communities currently on the platform should not be here at all.”

As Mike Isaac writes in The New York Times, no one can tell if a new content policy for Reddit can change its perception with a plan to “effectively ban spam, illegal activity and harassment, as well as the posting of ‘private or confidential information’ and sexual content involving minors,” nor make it a platform that can attract needed advertising.

(3) #AskELJames How It Went. One of the most-read articles I’ve published at Thought Catalog has turned out to be my June 30 piece Is Online Life Real Life? Ask E.L. James. No, ask Chuck Wendig. In it, I went over the firestorm of criticism that the Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L. James took when Twitter’s London offices hosted a live chat with her for the release ofGrey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian. As I wrote there:

Misgivings about the material [in James’ books] — in terms of misogyny, BDSM, abusive relationships, and James’ woefully bad writing (seemingly the one thing no one disagrees about) — rose quickly to the moment. A storm of invective overwhelmed the event.

But what made the event even more compelling happened when the author Chuck Wendig, widely known for his supportive stance on women’s rights, tried to counsel civil discussion. “One tweet called James the lady-c-word,” he wrote, “while chastising the abuse found in the book — which sounds like abuse about abuse.”

Wendig? Ended up beating a hasty retreat of his own. He was waved off by people who clearly felt that their right to speak was more equal than others’. Someone, as I wrote, seems to have seen him as “a hegemonic male stepping, unwanted, into a women’s debate.” Wendig, who is rarely a man to withdraw easily, wrote, “I think of myself as feminist, but maybe I’m not a particularly good one.”

And what I found myself writing was this:

The question our sociologists need to study is not why people feel free to be so boorish online but why they’re so angry in the first place. There’s so much negative energy “out there” in our cyberspace — which is really “in here,” the small space of our hearts. And that means, finally, that there is precisely such pain, such anguish, such seething disregard, right here IRL. In real life.

Let’s get back to our village square.

Skipping The Discovery Step

When we stand in the virtual marketplace and shout our displeasure at one another without first checking to see if our objections are warranted, we risk damaging reputations, defaming colleagues, smearing people and efforts that deserve no such treatment.

And I’ve come to believe that this is a systemic problem in online discoursedirectly related to the convenience of knee-jerk complaint there.

In real life, it’s not particularly easy to get yourself into the town square and stand hollering at the buildings about someone you dislike. At best, you’ll get funny looks and sharp requests to keep it down. At worst, you might get yourself arrested for disturbing the peace. If you’re really willing to go through so much, maybe it’s worth more to you to look into what you’re complaining about.

Online? It’s incredibly easy to throw around your displeasure. Ironically, it’s also incredibly easy online to contact someone before opening up the scream-fest.

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There’s more: Read the full story at Writer Unboxed

By Porter Ander­son
Follow @Porter_Anderson

Writer Unboxed: In Our CyberVillage: So Much Anger

Originally published at www.WriterUnboxed.com

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