A repentent Clay Shirky writes about The Failure of #amazonfail:
After an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes lost their Amazon sales rank, and therefore their visibility in certain Amazon list and search functions, we participated in a public campaign, largely coordinated via the Twitter keyword #amazonfail (a form of labeling called a hashtag) because of a perceived injustice at the hands of that company, an injustice that didn’t actually occur.
Shirky notes that Amazon’s de-ranking of LGBT titles “was an event of mainly technological propagation” and that the lack of intention should mitigate our collective outrage.
Shirky then uses the Amazon situation to make the more general point that “Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act” and that “The problems they (Amazon) have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began.”
A good reminder for all of us that every categorization system and every ranking algorithm (from Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress to Twitter hashtags) is rooted in and reflective of ideology. Feminists long ago noted that “the personal is political” … all of us would be wise to remember that “the call number (or hashtag, or ranking algorithm) is political too.”
4/15/09, 3:20pm PST: Edited to add some links to Amazon’s explanation:
Feral Librarian 
Earlier responses from Amazon reps to concerned authors suggested that the company had decided to classify any book with positive, or even neutral, LGBT content as “adult.” Following the furor, Amazon claimed “glitch,” without explaining what exactly caused the alleged glitch, or why authors were initially told the loss of their sales rank was a conscious policy decision on its part.
I don’t see how a”glitch” could selectively affect only those works–fiction, popular non-fiction, and scientific–that portrayed homosexuality in a neutral or favorable light; how it could leave unaffected the memoirs of straight female porn stars, but delist those of gay male porn stars; how it would allow books portraying homosexuality as something to be “cured” to remain top-ranked, but render “The Picture of Dorian Gray” invisible. The company has not come clean about what really happened.
Comments on Shirky’s blog have made these same points more eloquently than I. I believe Shirky (and you, Chris) are letting Amazon off the hook too readily.
Typing this was painful and slow–I’m housebound, recovering from an accident–but I felt compelled to respond. Thanks.
LikeLike
Surajit — you may well be right that Shirky & I are letting Amazon off the hook too easily. It is starting to occur to me that I may be guilty of jumping too quickly on the “let Amazon off the hook” bandwagon; just as Shirky claims we all jumped too quickly on the “Amazon is evil” bandwagon.
I do think this incident highlights the incredibly political nature of all classification schemes … and I hope that issue doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.
Does a biography of Ellen DeGeneres get a subject heading of “lesbian” when a biography of Oprah certainly doesn’t get assigned a subject heading of “straight” (not sure if such a subject heading exists)?
The books that were affected shared some kind of common metadata — and decisions about how metadata get assigned are inherently political. I’m not sure people think about the LC Classification system as an inherently political social construction.
Anyway — thanks for calling me (and Shirky) out, and I hope your recovery is quick!
LikeLike
i don’t really understand this policy of removing LGBT books, i mean what’s obscene about them??.. sexual orientation is a matter of personal choice, homosexuals don’t choose to become lesbians and gays….just like heterosexual people don’t choose their orientation.
LikeLike
Whether you think sexual orientation is a choice or not, it is important to understand that the initial outrage over the Amazon situation was based on faulty information. According to Amazon spokeperson, the flagging of LGBT books was a “glitch”, not a change in policy.
LikeLike