Tech Stream

#amazonfail

16 April 2009

I had it on my agenda to include something in Tech Stream this week about #amazonfail.  What is it?  Well the # (hash tag) at the beginning indicates that “amazonfail” is a twitter search label, allowing people ‘tweeting’ to categorise the content of their post. It implies that somehow Amazon, the online retail store, has made a monumental blunder (ie “fail”).  Over the Easter weekend a story started breaking that the company had removed the “sales rank”  from hundreds of books with gay and lesbian themes, essentially burying them from view.  Fail.

Needless to say it provoked outrage online, where the story spread like wildfire on twitter and other social network sites. But it turns out that it wasn’t quite a deliberate attempt by the company to discriminate against this literature based on its content, nor was it the work of a hacker. It was most likely a technical error in Amazon’s “backroom” that caused the problem, although this contradicted an earlier statement by the company which suggested that it was just filtering adult content.   This comment of course generated more, probably justifiable, outrage.

There will be more fallout from the weekend’s events, and plenty of people have waded in with their analysis of  the #amazonfail meme.  One of the most recent and reasoned is from American writer Clay Shirky, author of the book Here Comes Everybody.  He writes in a recent blog post entitled “The Failure of #amazonfail” that:

“Though the #amazonfail event is important for several reasons, I can’t write about it dispassionately, because I was an enthusiastic participant in its use on Sunday. I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true…

I have been thinking about the internet as hard as I can for the better part of two decades, and for the latter half of that time, I’ve been thinking about the problems of categorization systems, and it never occurred to me that the possible explanation for systemic bias might be something having to do with a technological system instead of a human one, that a changed classification in the Amazon database could trigger the change in status of tens of thousands of books…

Whatever stupidities Amazon is guilty of, none of them are hanging offenses. The problems they have with labeling and handling contested categories is a problem with all categorization systems since the world began. Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act.“

Clay Shirky’s entire article is worth reading, as is the thoughts of the BBC’s Bill Thomson in “How Amazon Fail was Born” and Mary Hodder’s Techcrunch opinion piece “Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch” which offers some contrasting thoughts. I also reckon Meg Pickards’ thoughts on the issue are worth spending time with:

“Amazon may come out of this looking a little bedraggled, but I can’t help feeling that the social media mob isn’t coming out of this smelling of roses. The kind of ugly, prejudiced, underinformed, sneery, rude, kneejerk activity we saw over this weekend on Twitter and around the web makes me concerned, not proud, about the potential of social technologies.”

Unfortunately there won’t be time to cover this in the Tech Stream radio program this week but I’m happy to take your comments below and if you are still confused about Twitter you could do worse than read Patrick O’Neill’s opinion piece on ABC Unleashed or the excellent article on Slate by Farhad Manjoo entitled “Do I really have to join Twitter”.  In spite of the weekend’s events, or maybe because of them, Twitter is becoming quite the place to be.