April 03rd, 2024

    Gold Stars and Orange Pumpkin Stickers: Goodreads and the Never-Ending Grade School
Goodreads is a “social cataloging app” designed for booklovers to discover new books and interact with other booklovers. I use it primarily to keep track of the books I want to read. That’s an impossible task, but still, Goodreads gives me the impression that I might actually be able to manage or control my insatiable bibliomania.
I also maintain an author profile on there, which lets me keep track of all the books I’ve written (some good, mostly bad.) Many of the anthologies and magazines in which my stories have appeared are also listed on the site, some under my profile and others not.
Goodreads isn’t a perfect database, and sometimes authors with the same or similar names to mine find their way to my profile. I try to let the Goodreads staff know about this, but sometimes it feels like a losing battle and I let things stand as they are. I’m lazy that way.
If people want to believe that, in addition to writing sleazy violent stories, I also write children’s books or medical texts, so be it.
There is a famous social realist artist/painter named Joseph Hirsch and if you Google my name you’re more likely to get results related to him than me. His existence makes me regret not using “Joey Hirsch” as a penname, thereby sparing his estate the indignity of having his work associated with mine, if only inadvertently.
Goodreads, in addition to having some good features and good intentions, has its sinister side, like everything else on the internet. Especially everything social media-related.
A lot of what’s on the net is addictive by design. When designing their websites, apps, and services, many companies actually reach out to addiction specialists for help. Mind you, this help is not intended to make the services less addictive, but *moreso.* The features like notifications, the little messages that pop up, the bells and whistles, are stimuli meant to operantly condition users. They’re there to encourage certain behaviors—usually spending, but also engagement, so that one stays on the site longer, seeing advertisements and promotions. It’s also important to point out that Goodreads has been assimilated into the Bezos Borg, with all that entails.
I spend a good amount of time on Goodreads but nowhere near as much as many others. Some people spend so much time on Goodreads it’s hard for me to see when they have time to even crack a book. Multitasking is the way these days, but unless one is listening to audiobooks, it’s hard to see how one could read while doing anything else.
Does listening to a book even count as reading?
Goodreads, like any other piece of media, risks falling afoul of the old Marshall McLuhan principle, with the medium becoming the message. And while literacy is usually good thing, it’s probably not good to get addicted to any website, even one meant to encourage literacy and mutual appreciation of books.
The strangest two features of Goodreads have to be the Ratings and Followers features. For those users who aren’t authors, they probably haven’t seen the Author Dashboard. If you’re curious, you can google it to get a look at it.
It makes sense that people should be able to rate and review books, to call them masterpieces or pieces of shit. They can even use the physical copies of the books as doorstoppers, as toilet paper (a la Castaneda’s Don Juan), or to organize their very own book burnings. It’s all protected speech, and once it’s out of the author’s hands, it’s frankly none of their business what the reader does.
I personally never understood authors taking umbrage at harsh or critical reviews of their work. My relationship to my own work, (in case you haven’t noticed) is ambivalent at best. Additionally, like most people, I have my insecurities, doubts, and my own streak of self-loathing. Tell me not only that my books suck but that I suck, too, and—based on my mood—I’m as apt to agree with you as not. Not only will I agree, but I’ll probably amplify. In other words, anything vicious you can think of saying to me, I’ve crafted much, much worse words of self-wounding.
I spend so much time in the editing and revision process that I typically end up hating my own books as much or more than my harshest critics. This is true for even the books I think are good, and maybe moreso for them. After all, I did sweat and labor more over the creation of the good ones than the bad ones. Usually, at least, that’s the way it works. Sometimes trying gives the work a feeling of flop sweat, while a casual approach makes everything feel more organic, less forced.
Rereading anything I’ve written brings back the memories of the endless hours of proofreading, correcting, diagnosing problems of plotting and pacing.
I worked so much on crafting certain passages that, like an actor who’s played a certain role many times, I can remember sentences and even whole paragraphs verbatim. I get nauseous upon reencountering them, like Alex the Droog after being programmed by the Ludovico Technique to upchuck at the sight of boobs or the sound of Beethoven.
So, shitting on me is all well and good.
The weird part of the rating system is that there’s an Average Rating aggregate displayed at the top of my Dashboard. Right now my cumulative rating is 3.84 stars. How bizarre is that? They have me rated, pegged, weighted down to the fraction, to the hundredth decimal place. Something about that feels absurd, unhealthy, weirdly specific. I’d frankly rather just be sat in a corner of some room wearing a dunce cap and given a “zero” or an incomplete as opposed to contemplating exactly what 3.84 means.
It feels not just like a letter grade, but like some greater assessment of me, my Goodreads Social Credit Score if you will. Mulling this over is ridiculous, but it’s these ridiculous little things—subtle social pressures and cues—that tend to “nudge” our behaviors.
It reminds me of the energy usage experiment conducted in one neighborhood. Those households whose consumption habits were under-normal received little smiley face cards in the mail; those who rated average in consumption received faces bearing a tightlipped, taciturn expression; meanwhile energy hogs got scowling faces with angrily arched brows. The cards did actually modify behavior, for the better, in terms of consumption. But what is the ultimate message, aside from that people—wanting to be thought well of—are very susceptible to praise or punishment?
What, exactly is such a feature nudging me to do? Be a less shitty, less transgressive, more socially responsible writer?
I suppose I could find some way to game the feature, pen a novel about a transgendered superhero (or even better, heroine) who battles transphobic supervillains. Pen body-positive panegyrics to overweight women of color. Or I could take the opposite tact, write manosphere tracts about lifting weights and eating elk meat and how to defeat women in the family courts. Decry “wokeness” like various grifters in the mainstream conservative movement, hit all the campuses while bilking the outraged, anxiety-riddled middleclass for their hard-earned dollars.
I could also find some middle ground in the culture war, much easier to achieve if one is writing for children. All I’d have to do is steer clear of sorcery and the supernatural (lest some bible-thumpers classify my works as endorsing witchcraft.) I could write the text to a popup picture book about a boy who travels to distant lands every night when he falls asleep.
That might get my Star Rating from the high 3s up to the low 4s, thus assuring me a larger dacha and loge seating at the opera house.
In all seriousness, though, it’s weird to see that thing staring at me, those fractional stars (for lack of a better term) every time I log in. Film critic Roger Ebert once decried the “wackiness” of the star system he used to rate films, but he obviously found it a necessary evil. And this, remember, only required Ebert to traffic in stars and half stars, not weirder and smaller fractions like tenths of stars. What, I wonder, would he have made of a film that was awarded “3.84” stars by another critic? He probably would have concluded that the man was suffering from some weird form of obsessive compulsive disorder.
Hasn’t the internet foisted that kind of thinking on all of us, though, wrecked our attention spans, our minds, and therefore part of our humanity? Reduced nuance, complexity, and ambivalence to a like or dislike. Swipe left or swipe right?
Then there’s that aforementioned “Followers” feature we talked about. If I scroll down toward the right side of the Author Dashboard, there they are: little profile pics of men and women I don’t know, who don’t know me. What are they doing there? I rarely if ever have any interactions with them, and few, if any, ever like any of my status updates, whether I’m posting blog entries or book reviews.
Most, if they’ve reviewed one of my books, haven’t reviewed others, so they’re obviously not following me from work to work. This is understandable, as I have trouble remaining in one genre for any length of time. I have a wanderlust about me that keeps me from writing series, or establishing a reputation for one kind of writing. What (or who) are these people following, then? Maybe they’re all automatically signed up after reviewing one book, or something like that. Regardless, the idea of having followers is especially bizarre for someone as antisocial as me, someone whose battery is recharged rather than drained by isolation.
According to the widget, I’m up to 108 followers. I’ve been out of the Army for awhile now, so my concept of various troop size elements is a little rusty, but isn’t one-hundred more than a company? Isn’t it a bit closer to battalion in terms of strength? Should I summon the troops for muster and attempt to defeat another author on the Goodreads battlefield? And if my army defeats them, do I not thereby acquire their followers, thus assimilating them into my own army? Will the battalion not eventually become a brigade if I go from strength to strength, victory to victory?
Or, if I’m of a more sinister bent regarding what to do with my suasion over my disciples, I could start a cult, hand out LSD-laced Kool-Aid laced. Wait for the acid to take effect and then address the wide-open third eyes of my now pliable acolytes.
On a slightly more serious note, there’s something a little depressing, disheartening about all this. There’s an aridity to the knowledge that even in this—my one act of liberation from the constraints of society—I have somehow found myself fixed, assigned a grade. Smiling as some imago of a schoolteacher pulls the pumpkin sticker from her strip of paper and plants one in the center of my big ugly forehead.
Or even worse, leaves my forehead bare, cold and naked, forcing me to stare around the classroom at the other kids, their brows shining with bright gold stickers.