Procrastination post

[oyceter]

• About #AmazonFail: I haven't been tracking every post on it, though I think I have the gist. I am currently still deciding what to do; I have an Amazon credit card, and the extra $25 gift certificate every so often is really nice when I'm not allowing myself to buy books due to the student budget. On the other hand, I think I will start researching other credit cards with award systems and consider switching. While I do completely believe that taking the sales ranking off was an individual error—I worked in web dev and I know how things can slip through the cracks—that does not mask the underlying problem: Amazon has categorized books that positively portray (or sometimes just plain portray) LGBTQ relationships as adult. That's not something that happened as an individual error.
  
  I study information organization, and no matter how ordinary and boring of a topic it sounds like, as with all things in life, it is influenced by politics. Why else are people so concerned with terminology, like "Oriental" vs. "Chink" vs. "Asian American" vs. "ABC" vs. "BBC" vs. "Chinese"? It matters. Not only that, it matters whether something is categorized as "general" fiction versus "Asian" fiction; the underlying assumptions in a great deal of information organization are based on structural discrimination, and it's no different with Amazon's system. And this isn't new. Check out the Dewey Decimal system and what's listed as "other" and what isn't.
  
  More on Amazon's information organization here and here.


• I'm still trying to think of a theme for hosting the next Asian Women Carnival; any suggestions?


• For Wiscon, I'm on the Andrea Smith panel and the one about science and oppression. Yay, excuses to reread Octavian Nothing, Steerswoman, and Conquest! Does anyone know if the shounen panel made it through? Otherwise, I am considering doing spontaneous panels again.

Comments

[furikku.livejournal.com]

Wait, wrong link- this is the one I meant (http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166384.asp).

[oyceter]

Yeah, I mean it is better than actual malicious intent, but I also do not think Amazon is as innocent as it likes to appear. First, it basically says they have functionality that lets them filter out adult content, and it exposes some information about how they categorize things that makes me uncomfortable.

[furikku.livejournal.com]

I'm generally OK with filtering adult content, provided "adult" is meant to mean "pornographic or ultraviolent," but I can see where it gets problematic in the details. :/

What makes you uncomfortable about the categorization?

(I'm trying to see the skeezy sides and my radar isn't pinging well, partially because there was so much immediate overraction that I have trouble getting past the Devil's Advocate bits of my brain.)

[oyceter]

Well, it's less about the filtering per se and more the way they define "adult" (the reports of LGBT authors receiving notes that their work was adult before Amazonfail particularly make me nidgy), that they don't tell people they are filtering the results or how to turn that filtering off, and they don't let people edit what they consider as adult.

Like, I'm sure most of us have ideas of what is too adult and what is not (mine personally are based much more on violence than sex), but when a system tries to decree what is adult without tapping into the community first, it's never good. It reminds me of LJ's hamfisted way of trying to label adult content.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, same here.