Thread: How not to respond to a bad review
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Old 03-31-2011, 07:27 AM   #30
DMSmillie
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker View Post
Bullying is taking someone's lunch money. Stopping them from playing on the monkey bars. Threatening to beat them up if they don't do what you tell them to. Saying things they don't want to hear, especially in response to them swearing at you, is not bullying. Is "bullying" (especially with the prefix "cyber-", which seems to make everything scarier) going to be the next word doomed to be expanded into vagueness and uselessness?

Any adult who can't handle people criticizing their writing ability has no business claiming to be a writer, and I think the jury is still out whether they should even claim to be an adult.
The people who were responding directly to her in the blog discussion weren't bullying. The people who piled onto Amazon to leave vicious comments and 1 star reviews of her book purely in order to "punish" her for her outburst, were.

As for the "cyber" thing - I certainly don't use it to make it seem scarier. However I do classify it as something not quite the same as face to face bullying. It's a lot easier to bully someone anonymously and remotely than it is to do it face to face, and I suspect that many who indulge in that kind of Amazon 1-star blitz would never dream of standing in front of the same person and saying the same things (some of them quite personal and vicious) to her face. The end result can be the same, though - isolate them, intimidate them, beat them up emotionally and drive them out.

Those involved in the original blog discussion were the ones who were directly harangued and insulted by her, and they were able to respond directly to that, and tell her how they felt about it. Most of those who beat a path to Amazon weren't involved in that way, and were participating in the kind of "mob mentality" that rears its head sometimes. I'm sure they didn't think of what they were doing as "bullying" - probably thought of it as giving her her just deserts. But the cumulative impact of so many piling on like that and saying quite vicious things about not just the book but the author herself can be pretty devastating for the recipient, way beyond anything merited by her original outburst.
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