Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Storify: Who are the real GoodReads bullies?

At first, I didn't think I had anything to say about the StopGRBullies website, because there's already a lot being said, and I barely use my GoodReads account, nor do I know any of the people involved. 

However, as a librarian, I am interested in how this story has been documented. 
A lot of the discussion happened in the form of comments, tweets, private emails, and blog posts.*  And more importantly, some parts of the discussion were "disappeared" from the Internets after they received negative attention.

As more news stories develop this way (and it's definitely a news story now), I wonder if we as librarians are prepared to catalog what's happening on the Internet and put people in touch with primary sources.  Bloggers seem pretty adept at documentation, but the Internet is a slippery place and it's easy to get stuck in your own feedback loop. 

With this in mind, I decided to try using Storify (via AASL) to find and organize as much of the original source material as I could.  I'll be interested to see if any other content gets removed from these sites and what will happen to the links in my Storify article if that happens. 

See how I did! (If you're reading this in an aggregator, you'll probably have to visit the blog to see the embedded content.)



*This whole story raises interesting questions about what should be public and what should be private and whether we have different standards for different people, but that's a whole other blog post.

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