Internuts
I found this fragment of a post in the Argh Vault, a place that is now mostly Cherry Saturday bits scheduled to post on their various weekends. I started this in December of 2014, more than two years ago, but I know exactly why I started it: I’d been there.
Here’s the quote I pulled from Sam Biddle’s essay on Gawker:
http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-go...
“This is the one thing no one in public relations—pretty much a sham industry anyway, sure—has figured out, or is smart enough to put into practice. When you fuck up on the internet, do nothing. Say nothing. Remain motionless as best you can, no matter how much you want to explain, or argue, or contextualize. Shut up! Just shut up.”
The worst kerfluffle I ever got caught up in was the one over on Smart Bitches about the romance novelist they loved to bash for what in their opinion was truly terrible writing. Then one of the writers there found out that the romance author had copied passages from her non-fiction research books, and turned the hounds loose on her. And I opened my big fat mouth and said, “What did this woman do? Run over your dog?”
My point was that they had trashed her books twenty-eight times, and now they were going after her for sloppy writing. I was willing to bet that the romance writer didn’t realize what she was doing was plagiarizing. She wasn’t copying anybody’s story, she was just putting in the stuff she found on the black-footed ferret.
Yes, of course, that’s still plagiarism. My point, which I did not make well, was that she probably didn’t realize it wasn’t fair use because it was non-fiction. And then in my attempt to explain my position, I gave the example that when I was teaching college comp, I’d had to teach every one of my students what plagiarism was because almost all of them would copy their research. The romance author, I said, probably had never gone to college and had anybody explain that to her.
Yes, that was a STUPID thing to say because of course people took it to mean that I was saying anybody who hadn’t been to college would plagiarize because they were too dumb to know better. As a good friend of mine e-mailed me at the time, “SHUT UP ABOUT COLLEGE.”
At that point, I shut up about everything, but I’d still incurred the wrath of the mob and to this day, there are still people who think I love plagiarism. Not only do I love it, but anybody who speaks to me loves it: Poor Bob went to a Thrillerfest in NYC and had somebody demand that he condemn me for my stand; since we were barely speaking at the time, he said, “I don’t give a damn what she does,” and the woman said, “Well, you’re just as bad as she is then.” Yeah, that helped.
All of which is to say that I agree with Sam Biddle. If you’re on the net, sooner or later people are going to come after you, whether you deserve it or not, especially if you criticize something they’re invested in. Ignore them. You can’t win.
Just shut up.
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