Monday, October 20, 2014

Author-Stacking-Bloggers Thoughts

The THING. The awful drama that rocked the book blogging world over the weekend has got some buzz over the last few days. But apparently I live under the rock because I just discovered THIS Guardian article written by the author herself. Over the last hour I have been reading blogger's responses, tweets, and other opinions on what the situation brings. And yes, of course I know that everyone already posted about this but I just wanted to express on what I'm feeling and mark this day as the day when the blogging community remembered that this is still Internet. 


Screenshot at Oct 19 14-38-59

To recap the story, Kathleen Hale got offended about the blogger giving negative reviews and being very expressive about their comments and decided to "confront" the blogger in person. Yes, this included a background check ($19!!!), finding out where she lived, actually talking to her face to face, and trying to "catfish" her back. So who is supposed to be on who's side here? Yes, the blogger shouold not have used descriptive language when referring to someone's book but the author had no right to completely invade the privacy like this. 

So what is this mean for the book blogging world? The most scary thing is that in some way, we all have shared some sort of personal information. Our instagram, our address for the ARCs, our location. Technology right now can even give you directions to a person through Facebook so talk about being stackish! The problem is that this could have happened to anyone. And not even the authors or bloggers but someone random just wanted personal information. Sad truth is that thousands of people are victims to identity theft or stacking every year and needs to be reported. So please be careful and let's just do what we wanted to do from the beginning, which is explore our love and love of the others for books that helps us escape the reality. 

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